Workshop Data Table

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

November 1
Original title: “Let’s contact with something in your brain”

November 2

Audience: Public, Level: Foundation

In this workshop, particpants will paint with light. It will introduce light painting and animation, from the technical to the artistic. Students will use different lights as brush on canvas creating different forms, shapes, images, writings, etc. By the end of the workshop, students will have worked on their own light painting as well as a collaborative one.

For  ISEA2014 Delegates, Level: Intermediate

The Locating the Flow performance will embed participants within a social network using the Sixth Sense Travel App to explore the flow of objects and information across Zayed University. The aim of this participatory promenade performance is to introduce participants to two new smart phone Apps that demonstrate how network technology can use patterns within existing industrial and social activities to reveal new opportunities for sharing.

See the city anew by walking the routes of hidden waterways, using historical and contemporary maps. Participants are invited to a workshop that will include walking and the creation of a visual impression through the use of mobile phones and a dedicated internet site. Questions of urban land use, the environment and issues particular to the location raised during the walk will be discussed after the walk.

Workshop Statement

This course is meant to serve as an introduction in computer graphics and computer animation. A substantial part of the course is hands-on, using Amiga’s. The Amiga and the Macintosh will be compared.

We have had a long history of handwriting from prehistory up to this day although the importance of handwriting has diminished with the development of digital technology. During the digital age, many analog activities are simulated on screen, handwriting included. My research explores unconventional methods of creating the type with techniques unique to type design by customizing an open source 3D printer as a lettering machine. This project was accidentally found while building and playing with the DIY ceramic 3D printer as a new tool for typographic practice in the post-digital age. This workshop will provide instructions and hands-on experience on how to turn 3D printers into writing machines. Designers have used premade tools as it is not easy to create their own. Designer as a toolmaker, I have built my tools including custom 3D printers to print three-dimensional ceramic type. While I was building my printers, I used a pen to calibrate the printer and realized that the 3D printer could be turned into a lettering machine. The letter forms are drawn by using the G-programming language called G-code that is widely used for computer-aided manufacturing. The G-code could be generated from STereoLithography file or Bézier curve; the code could be manually written or edited as well. For example, to draw a simple 40mm X 40mm square, you can use Rectangle Tool and draw the box in Adobe Illustrator. We cannot see the complex algorithm behind the screen as Illustrator translates the computer language and only show the simplified version. On the other hand, G-code shows the raw data in a different programming language to draw the box. The G-code could be generated and manually written/edited as well. For example, to draw a simple 40mm X 40mm square, one can use Rectangle Tool and draw the box in Adobe Illustrator. We cannot see the complex algorithm behind the screen as Illustrator translates the computer language and only show the simplified version. On the other hand, G-code shows the raw data to draw the box. G-code looks like this:
G28
G1 X20 Y20
G1 Z0.100
G1 X-20 Y20 Z0
G1 X-20 Y-20 Z0
G1 X20 Y-20 Z0
G1 X20 Y20 Z0
If the square needs infill patterns, the code would be more complicated and more extended. To generate the G-code, several different pattern options could be used: Rectilinear, Line, Concentric, Honeycomb, 3D Honeycomb, Hilbert Curve, Archimedean Chords, and Octagram Spiral. I found a way to generate custom g-code from Bezier curve using a plugin for Rhino called Grasshopper. There are more advanced options for various letterforms and writing instruments, even brush pens which need upstrokes and downstrokes.
This workshop will provide a way to translate the digital data into the typographic form, line by line, drawn on paper. Also, the use of digital fabrication pushes the boundary of the medium in typography both regarding concept and materiality.

In the footsteps of machinima making – the use of video and computer games to direct movies with a game engine or in a 3D environment – games can be perceived as a medium and as a raw material for artists to create hybrids artworks from stop motion, video art, experimental cinema, installations; and can be transformed into colors in order to produce a Mash Up, and a totally new original artwork. This workshop aims to transform an object of mass consumption and entertainment into a means of film production and expression. The workshop intends to create hybrid works with students or professionals interested to push the boundaries between the video and computer games and the art world.

The Machinima Game art workshop aims to address critically video games and art, as installation, performance, digital painting in motion, gaming, interactivity or video. ISEA2019’s themes of light and darkness will drive us to discover and focus on games related to these themes and will allow attendees to play with games of lights and darkness wandering in dark spaces looking for some light created by the moon or the sun or just reflected by a mirror. They will record these gameplay and then create video artworks or installations escaping darkness to find enlighted spaces. Each step of the workshop can enable everyone to fit into a creative process: games wandering and recording, transforming games spaces into set design, video editing, sound mixing. The exhibition of each artwork will constantly be reminded to participants as a core aspect of their creation.

The workshop begins with a screening of machinima and game artworks. This screening shows the variety of games used to design films or videos, as well as the variety of approaches, from the fan fiction to the most experimental artworks. Following this presentation of machinima and game art screening, the audience discovers different production techniques of machinima, with dedicated softwares like Moviestorm or Iclone and with video games, like GTA for its video editor or any PC games using FRAPS to capture gameplay in real time. The use of independent and experimental games is also highly recommended in order to benefit from the wide diversity of indie game productions.

In order to facilitate the discovery of indie and experimental games, Isabelle Arvers will present a selection of games focusing on light and darkness like the games : Reflections, Matter, Beyound perception, Lumini, Mirror moon, One and light, Hyper light drifters, Mountain, Penumbra, One hand clapping. Local indie and experimental games will be added to this selection by Isabelle Arvers thanks to her meetings with the local indie game  scene. The hybrid artworks created by the participants to the workshop will be exhibited in ISEA2019 exhibition. They will be presented as video screenings and video installations. The game art/machinima exhibition will be coordinated and curated by Isabelle Arvers with the help of the ISEA2019 team.

National Academy of Dramatic Arts, Paris

The “Rythme(s) d’espaces” workshop is based on a hybrid scenographic device. A physical staircase of four steps and a length of 7.20 meters is reproduced and co-located in a virtual space. Three participants (wearing VR headsets) react to dynamic variations of the virtual staircase, thus influencing their physical presence. The representation of the virtual space(s) inhabited by the participants are projected on a large screen. At times co-present, at times alone, they evolve in fixed or animated environments. The workshop explores the balance between constraints and freedom of movement, contemplation and interactivity and questions the ability of a virtual environment to be a place for the bodies to co-inhabit.

How do these hybrid spaces give rhythm to the bodies, and how can the bodies in turn give rhythm to the representation spaces ? How to improvise together, connect and mutually transform in a physically identical and virtually different space ? How can our movements co-exist in a symbiotic and enduring manner ? How does the other experience my movements and resonate with me ? By creating a series of variations of the sense of presence of other bodies, the device is put to the test in its common habitability and its ability to create a symbiosis between the three participants. How can we co-evolve in harmony?

The workshop is based on poetic interplays and transformations between the bodies in relation to the staircase and the spaces in relation to the bodies. By showing relations of augmentation or alienation, we aim to present a critical reflection on the symbiosis between the bodies grappling with our device. The body becomes a point of connection between physicality and virtuality, a hybrid space, an expanding field to be reimagined.

The workshop will be followed by a performance in the same room.

Workshop Statement

The aim of the workshop is to introduce simple and easy learnable ways to create interactive sounds and music. The workshop is based on two popular, open source languages and the combination of these. Using these free tools it is easy to create user interactions that are targeting the web or mobile devices. By the end of the workshop, each participant will have a general knowledge about (musical, artistic) interfaces and their cognitive extensions, basics of digital sound & interface design.

Duration: Whole Day.

Workshop Statement

We propose to examine and observe artistic creation on mobile screens through an actual practice. The goal is to design and build applications mainly for the iPad, and also for iPhone, with not only the intention to produce art works, but also to constitute a kind of mobile screens image-object manual. A specific grammar of the interactive situation, linking the user gesture to the representation reaction, may be defined by this manual. We do not wish to try to innovate by developing new services or utilities for last generation mobile phones, but rather to clarify the potential of these devices in contemporary artistic practices. Nowadays mobile devices permit new relationships (interactive situations) between the user and the representation. Thanks to various embedded sensors, it is possible to use the device’s relative orientation, given by the user’s hand and multitouch interactions, to change the aspect of the represented space or objects and to modify sounds or texts. Therefore, this workshop aims to analyze the different ways a user/spectator can interact with the representation to constitute an interaction-grammar that is specific to mobile displays. Various short scenarios will then be imagined to create applications.  If a certain simplicity is respected for these applications to facilitate their creation and to maintain maximum clarity of meaning, their number could be significant. Each application can be seen as demonstrating a form of interactivity with mobile screens and an aesthetic art work. All applications could then constitute a kind of manual, an object both artistic and demonstrative, even educational.

Workshop Statement

We walk through the world looking. Sight is the dominant sense with which we are trained to take in the world around us. The focus of the mapping exercise is to amplify our “other” senses. Let’s quickly put forward a premise. What happens with the loss of one of the five human senses  – vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste? The answer is known; the remaining senses take on more depth. Mapping as walking, as learning to see heightens our awareness of seeing with all our senses. The mapping exercises share in expanding traditional conditions of spatial properties by exploring the sensory perceptions of any given spatial locale. The approach provides the participant with the resources for drawing upon the range of sensory experiences to fully “see” the environment. All participants will be asked to record in various media (photographs, writing, moving image, sound) their impressions and perceptions of Cibali-Fener-Balat neighborhood. These subjective narratives -formed in relation to the urban tissue- will be presented as a collective installation. Participants will explore the physical, geographic and cultural area of Cibali-Fener-Balat.  Through systems of observation and methods of recording information they will address interpretations of place. The aim of the workshop is to provide participants with a method for learning to see through their senses the world around them, how to record this information and how it can become the research tool for developing creative projects. Using a specific locale, participants explore the physical, characteristic of place; focusing on seeing with all of their senses, developing the knowledge of the sounds of a space, the feel of a space, the taste of the space and the look of the space. Mapping as walking, as learning to see is an ongoing work, on the move, nomadic and transitory, providing insights that help the artist/designer to see the physical environment in new ways.  It converts the familiar to the unfamiliar and vice versa.  The essence of the project is to make us utilize all of our senses and to learn to see the non-visible. The act of decoding the cityscape through the senses challenges participants to “see” the landscape of the city through motion in real time, moving through the space of the city to experience the sight, sound, smell, taste and feel of the urban environment. It provides a means of interpreting and defining the city as a physical place full of sensory experiences. A momentary encounter with something foreign –architecture, object, food, and a scent- has the potential of crystallizing the experience. Making place more than a set of coordinates. The process of gathering and recording these experiences provides the participant with a reservoir of sensory codes stored for future use in the creative process. The workshop has three stages:

1. data collection:  the first day of the workshop groups will be sent on walking explorations of the Cibali-Fener-Balat neighborhood. They will be given a “map” that is devoid of any specific markers beyond street directions. Over the course of their day they will become  “familiar’ with the locale and began mapping their sensory experiences.
2. sharing: day two, each participant will experience the locale with a diffract set of eyes and prior associations these will be critical in the follow up conversation of how we “see “ with our senses.
3. design outcomes:  The final phase is for the artist /design to take this information into the studio and to use it as the starting point for the creating a project that reflects the essence of place.  We will collect information from participants for months to come after the workshop.

experimentation to the participants. These experiments are proposed within the framework of the spatialization of the Cahiers de l ’’Anticipation et de l’Imaginaire, a scientific and cultural publication of the research group Symbiose.

The participatory dimension through the co-construction of multiple imaginaries with all the participants constitutes the dynamic of the workshop. Initially, each student-researcher brings into play their own research, which then becomes a support for experimentation. In a second phase, the feedback from the experiences will allow the creation of new narratives. Three kits will structure this activity: an action-kit (scenarios), a skênê-kit (imaginary) and a capture-kit (archives).
1- The action-kit: the participants equipped with the different matters of experimentation will be invited to wander according to a scenario defined by a card game or a generative system.
2- The skênê-kit: following the retranscription of the spatial and corporal experience, of the sensations and emotions felt, the participants are invited to compose a story turned towards a future imaginary (utopia, dystopia and science-fiction) by relying on the creative methods of the skênê (dramaturgy).
3- The capture kit: the capture tools (audio recording, photos, video, etc.) will make it possible to
collect and index the materials at the origin of these stories. The referencing of the image maps, words and terms, and the samples of materials will allow these experiences to be translated into a landscape,then a support for the narrative to come.

The synthesis writing will have the importance of a reflexive text: questioning through the prism of perception the construction of an imaginary on the one hand, and on the other hand, the analysis of the modalities of indexation of the different proposed matters, created within the framework of a research based on the imaginary understood as symbiotic form.

These following matters for experimentation will be proposed in connection with the research
projects: silicone and textile skin grafts by Audrey Brugnoli, mirror objects by Eva Hardy, wood ash materials by Laury Guillien, sound creation based on adolescent words by Lucile Cornet-Richard, Ré-confort objects by Sophie Larger, salt-crystalised objects by Natalia Baudoin.

The feedback from the participants in these experiential devices will allow the construction of new narratives from a dramaturgical point of view, with the aim of renewing the representations at work with diversified audiences within the broad framework of the workshop proposed here. Indeed, these stories, of all types (narrative, dramatic, documentary, poetic) will not be intended to illustrate the various research subjects but to create rough edges capable of questioning the users of aforementioned research. Thus, a work of fictional synthesis should make it possible to question scientific and artistic approaches from the point of view of experience on the one hand (of the subjects), thus energizing the fields of application through the practice of research- creation by the symbiotic means of crossed imaginaries, between users and content producers.

The Symbiose group’s research projects focus on contemporary ecological and societal issues in
various areas: housing, health and wellness, crafts and industry, education, work, and mobility.
In conjunction with research through art, research through design forms part of what is a
multidisciplinary, collaborative, and evolutionary approach. Here it is developed through projects that implement a reasonable and sensitive perception of spaces, bodies, objects, and materials, in interaction with user-actors and their living spaces, in symbiosis with the environment. Concerned with a wide variety of scales (space, body, object, material, light, atom), its research involves a large range of skill profiles (designers, artists, engineers, architects, playwrights, sociologists, physicians, anthropologists, etc.).
Activities are divided into three main fields: health, crafts and semi-industrial production and
innovative approaches of education. The aim is to understand how the practical application of
complex materials can lead to a groundbreaking rethink of our society, not as technocentric
futurology, but as a humanist future in symbiosis with the environment.
Les Cahiers d’anticipation et de l’imaginaire allow for the exploration of new methodologies through practice and to experiment with new hypotheses about possible futures based on the results of projects undertaken within the research group.

This workshop provides in-depth insights into the strategies used in analogue sound synthesis and invites you to use the Max Brand synthesizer and the Synlab Modular system. The Max Brand synthesizer is a unique instrument developed in a ten year long close collaboration between composer Max Brand and sound engineer Bob Moog since the 1950s. The one of a kind Synlab Modular system in the ICEM studio (since 1975), with its comprehensive range of modules and extremely flexible connection possibilities, is one of the most powerful analogue sound generating systems worldwide.

Sponsored by: Land Niederösterreich, Österreischisches Kulturforum Berlin, IMA Institut für Medienarchäologie, Lender: Max-Brand-Archiv, Langenzersdorf (at), Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Musiksammlung.

How do we make a creative machine? Creativity involves “a multitude of definitions, conceptualizations, domains, disciplines that bear on its study, empirical methods, and levels of analysis, as well as research orientations that are both basic and applied – and applied in varied contexts.”

This workshop follows a series of studies conducted in the classroom setting at CMU and UC San Diego. To begin, participants were asked to provide a definition of creativity specific to machines. Then more questions emerged: Can we computationally model ambiguity? Would a novelty search result in valuable discoveries? Where is the threshold between randomness and creativity? How do we evaluate the creativity of an algorithm?

To answer these questions, participants developed sets of criteria to assess their own and peer groups’ creative AI and ML projects. Although such a human-centred method is subjective, participants found that the exercise helped them to better describe and interpret dimensions of algorithmic creativity.

For twenty years the Media Literacy Project has been creating programs and campaigns that ensure our communities can access, analyze, and create media. This interactive multimedia presentation will provide an introduction to media literacy, share success stories of media production for community engagement, and offer best practices for curriculum development. The first twenty participants will receive Media Literacy Toolbox, a DVD with over 100 media examples that can be used in organizations and classrooms alike.

dLux MediaArts brings to ISEA2013 the inaugural MEMEBRAIN Art Hackfest. dLux MediaArts is partnering with Dorkbot, The Portals Project (Sydney), Darwin Community Arts (Darwin) and Kulchajam (Byron Bay) to bring together artists, designers, techies and more in a cross-locational Hackfest. Collaborators are invited to explore the participatory nature of technology and art. In a unique hot house environment, creative teams will design, play and build prototype projects that challenge the way we use art and digital media to affect cultural perceptions. MEMEBRAIN Art Hackfest will provide an important opportunity for the local Sydney community, partner locations and ISEA2013 delegates to engage in momentous electric exchange in a casual, entertaining and social atmosphere. The general public are invited to interact with the projects online throughout the hack, as well as join the teams on the final day for a closing exhibition and live performances.

Theme: AI – Generative

Mental Garden is an interactive experience based on the collection of brain waves. The experiment aims to create a collection of stored, shareable and exchangeable mental flowers. The device allows visitors to record a mental memory in a time-stamped digital capsule uploaded on a blockchain to be authenticated through the generation of an unique NFT.

Thus, each user is invited to equip themselves with the headset and start recording to monitor their brain activity. As he thinks about his memory, his brain activity is translated to generate a digital plant which is the materialization of his thought. With the different creations, a mental garden is created representing the mental memories recorded by the visitors.

At the end of the experience, the visitor’s creation is minted on OpenSea, the decentralized NFT marketplace. Each visitor then becomes an artist and has the opportunity to share or sell their owned artwork. Through the collection, every creation contributes to a collective artwork.

The real-time generative design is made possible thanks to brain-environment interfaces allowing everyone, regardless of gender, age or physical condition, to generate their mental flower in an inclusive way.

Thinking about the garden means having to go back to the foundations of the world and humankind. The garden offers a form of appeasement, calm and serenity. Let’s cultivate our mental garden!

Metamedialab is a citizen lab for exploring and elaborating minor perceptions, a laboratory of research into the ways in which media shape societies not so much at the level of content but of their very structures, particularly in terms of how they organise perception. This is what we will call metamedia: the thinking of the very frameworks and perceptual structures mobilised by media. Ontohacking implies a critical reinvention of such structures, which alters the way bodies move, relate and constitute social ecologies.

A half-day workshop introducing a computerised method for corresponding real time computer animation with live music for performance and installation. The workshop includes a demonstration of Ritter’s Orpheus software and videos of live performances.

As a visual artist, my motivation for creating an interactive video system stemmed from an increasing dissatisfaction with the major limitation of visual media. After finding myself associating with more musicians than visual artists, this limitation became increasingly obvious and an envy developed for musicians and their manner for creating art. These new associations led me to the conclusion that musical media, such as live music, are primarily concerned with life, while visual media, such as painting, drawing and sculpture, are concerned with that opposite state of being, death.

This difference becomes obvious by comparing the experience of visual media with the experience of live music. In a museum or gallery, for example, visitors calmly stare at inanimate objects on display, rarely speaking and never clapping or cheering in approval. These viewers are like the bereaved at a wake, paying respect to a friend who will soon be entombed in the nether world of a gallery’s storage room. What could be so different from the experience of the visual art than a live music performance? While music performances come in a variety of styles, from classical to new music to rap, they all provoke audiences to clapping, cheering, dancing and a whole range of physical activities which are strictly verboten in a museum of fine arts.

This goal is being pursued through performances containing large video projected imagery and live improvised music. During these events, image selection and cinematic effects are intricately associated with the music’s formal structure as an attempt to capture the spontaneity of live music with video. The result of the pursuance has been the development of an interactive video system and the presentation of numerous international performances in which audiences witness the birth and existence of an interactive video controlled by live improvised music.

Workshop Statement

Come get involved in a participatory performance art project using mobile video with Canadian media artist and curator, Camille Baker. She will guide you through a series of activities using and creating personal abstract videos to explore ways to communicate visually, gesturally and non-verbally repurposing the mobile device’s means of communication and expression. Camille Baker will facilitate participants to explore embodied visual expression through mobile video practice developed from MINDtouch : Embodied Transference, mobile video research workshops for SMARTlab PhD project (2007-2010). This workshop explores mobile video/media on phones for their immediacy, low quality – imperfectness, but with spontaneity that is at the speed of thought – with its rewriting, superimposing, and remixing of ideas, flashes and clashes of images and emotion, layering of meaning and stream of consciousness and equivalent and/or simulation of telepathy and collective (if chaotic) intelligence. The participants invited to participate in the video experience will explore their own consciousness, non-verbal emotional/affective senses and dream states, as well as embodiment and communication, using mobile media tools to express themselves non-verbally. Participants are guided through exercises to create intimate instant video expressions to explore ways to communicate visually, gesturally and non-verbally, repurposing the mobile device’s means of communication and connection. Participants are asked to bring their own video phone or camera phones and an open mind. Participants in a group are led through a 10 minute meditation/guided visualization/exploration of senses as preparation. Each participant then takes their video phone and is given 3-4 separate activities to record, based on themes or goals provided, to represent certain types of internal emotions, thoughts, perceptions and sensations.

Workshop Statement

Second Life has often been misinterpreted as a game. I prefer the metaphor of an empty stage, suggesting open-ended creativity. This virtual stage lets me take advantage of working independent of gravity or real-world physical laws to create experiences impossible in the real world. In Mirror Garden3: Twist, Turns and the Myth of Flying, I use several ancient myths of Flying to connect digital culture to  analog roots. It is an attempt to use global, virtual tools to remind us of our shared humanity and human desire beyond differences in media, culture and religion. For the workshop we meet in-world on the NYU Island in Second Life inside the installation. You may contribute your associations about flying on an interactive notecard or a parallel blog before learning to build. Building is done using real-time tools included in Second Life. The interactive tools do not require a 3D modeling background. Simple objects become complex with the use of textures, alpha channels and attached physical or interactive behavior. The immersive experience is intensified through voice chat and (remote) collaboration. The workshop has 4 segments: Introduction, Model/Texture, Sculpt/Behavior, Explore: After a 1-hour introduction and a demonstration using installation objects we form small teams to build a simple structure and apply texture maps for detail. In the third hour we use more intricate transformations and modify physical properties for sculptural work. In addition, I will demonstrate how to add scripts and links. The last hour is used for an individual project or to fine-tune the two earlier models. Participants will walk  away with a small library of digital objects, textures, scripts, and landmarks to places with exemplary architecture, art and instruction to return any time for further exploration. To shorten the introductory phase, participants have to register their own avatar prior to starting the workshop. Links: download Second Life (SL) software and install prior to the workshop http://secondlife.com  > “Download Second Life”. Then register your avatar at http://secondlife.com > “Join Now”. Note: Second Life use is free. For this workshop you do not need to register a credit card number. Each participant will be given a small stipend in Linden$ (SL currency) at the workshop introduction.

Workshop Statement

Description: With the current explosion and quick expansion of music in digital formats, and the computational power of modern systems, the research on machine learning and music has gained increasing popularity. As complexity of the problems investigated by researchers on machine learning and music increases, there is a need to develop new algorithms and methods to solve these problems. Machine learning has proved to provide efficient solutions to many music-related problems both of academic and commercial interest. An example of the later is the application of machine learning techniques to the key challenge in the area of automatic generation of music material. The workshop provides a forum for theoretical discussions on machine learning for music generation, and also encourages performances of generated creative outputs as part of workshop participation. Duration: Half Day

Workshop Statement

The objective of this workshop is to describe the potentialities of mobile tagging (2D barcodes like QRcodes) as a tool for increasing and spreading the effects of mixed realities in art. In this sense, we will start introducing the main concepts and some examples of mixed realities followed by the concepts and examples of mobile tagging, showing that they are connected and benefit each other. Mixed reality (MR) refers to the fusion of the physical and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. On the other hand, mobile tagging is the process of reading a 2D barcode using a mobile device camera. Allowing the encryption of URLs in the barcodes, the mobile tagging can add a digital and/or online layer to any physical object, providing several levels of mixed realities related to that object. The uses of these levels of mixed realities have applications in several areas from medicine and engineering to the arts. Although mixed realities technologies have existed for decades, they were expensive and usually confined to the lab. Nowadays mobile devices (cellphones, smartphones, PDAs) can be used as tools for mixed realities. Due to their pervasiveness and low cost their potentiality for increasing the dissemination of mixed realities is enormous and can be leveraged by mobile tagging as described next: There are many types of mobile tags (2D-barcodes), the QRCodes and Datamatrix being the most popular formats. It is possible to encrypt many kinds of data into them: texts, contact information and URLs. Since the mobile tags are simple inexpensive printed tags that can be placed in virtually any physical object or person in addition to the fact that cell phones with cameras have become a very popular and pervasive device, the mobile tagging process can be said to be one of the easiest and simplest ways of creating mixed realities and one of the ways of contributing to the internet of things. In other words, mobile tags work like physical links to the web, allowing virtually anything to be part of an expanded mixed reality environment. In this workshop, the audience will use their own notebooks and mobile devices. People with only mobile devices will be able to participate.

W&T LAB tries to figure how to lower the psychological barrier of beginners to learn/use/enjoy the technologies. MOM (board) is body-shaped board based on ATtiny85 that is a microcontroller chip. Workshop is divided into two parts: the tutorial of MOM and the application of MOM. Participants assemble MOM and learn how to use MOM. And then they design their own product with MOM and prepared materials.

W&T LAB tries to figure how to lower the psychological barrier of beginners to learn/use/enjoy the technologies. MOM (board) is body-shaped board based on ATtiny85 that is a microcontroller chip. Recently many people learned of a micro-controller specially Arduino, but still is not easy to understand for person who is not familiar with technologies. MOM is designed as a body, so it is easy to understand the concept of pins and each pin’s functions. We don’t normally use all pins of micro-controller and sometimes feel confused what to do with those pins. As a simplified version of micro-controller board, MOM can give basic information on micro-controller. Through assembling it, you can understand how to build a micro-controller circuit. Kids love its unique design that can stimulate them to learn physical computing. MOM has sew-able pads that can be used for e-textiles. E-textile is a good way to appeal women and kid who are interested in making and learning technologies. MOM is a micro- controller board working with 3v and it can connect to diverse inputs and outputs like sensors, speaker and switch that also working with 3v. MOM is programmable and Arduino compatible so you can program and upload it to MOM with Arduino IDE. You can make interesting outputs with MOM such as wearable accessories, tools, toys, musical instruments and craftworks. Workshop is divided into two parts: the tutorial of MOM and the application of MOM. Participants assemble MOM and learn how to use MOM. And then they design their own product with MOM and prepared materials.

Tutorial Statement (‘Seminar’)

This seminar will show examples of multimedia performance work produced by drama students in an Australian Secondary School. Digital technology and software were used as the basis for exploration of Brecht’s theory of alienation.

Emphasis is not placed on the effects of software or technology, but (nevertheless we should investigate) how the teacher and students interact and use it to produce performance and create meaning. Students produced and interacted with: soundscapes, techno music, dance, video, digital images, animated masks, laser transparencies.

Seminar participants will be invited to experience drama exercises using technology.

Multispecies and Urban Spaces is a series of interactive walking tours made possible by an augmented reality (AR) browser for iPhone/iPad developed by Phoenix Toews. The works (in progress) make visible social, political and ecological histories of multispecies relations in urban spaces. Presenters will explain the tours, and then discuss researching local spaces and hidden histories, and developing technical, aesthetic and conceptual possibilities for an AR, GPS enabled platform, including ways of structuring an active, meaningful experience for the user. In groups, participants will storyboard/design one section of an AR tour regarding human/animal entanglements around Albuquerque.

Tutorial Statement

As regular music software adopts generative, autonomous and interactive capabilities, and an increasing number of practitioners involve metacreative processes in their work, musical metacreation has matured from an exploratory field to a more focused and applied one in which usability is a core issue. This tutorial will develop the core themes of musical metacreation in light of contemporary issues of system design from the perspective of creative practitioner, commercial developer and interacting musician. A particular focus will be on emerging applications of MuMe technology.
We propose to run an introductory tutorial on a range of MuMe topics that will introduce electronic art researchers and students to current issues in the field, and lead on to a structured discussion of current MuMe research questions, particularly those that exhibit a strong overlap with ISEA2015 themes.
We also propose a series of three curated concerts featuring MuMe systems. We will make available a collection of video and audio documentation of additional MuMe systems. The creators of some of these works will then contribute to the MuMe presentations during the tutorial. Duration: Half Day.

The Guerrilla Grafters graft fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing, ornamental fruit trees. Over time, delicious, nutritious fruit is made available to urban residents through these grafts. We aim to prove that a culture of care can be cultivated from the ground up. We aim to turn city streets into food forests, and unravel civilization one branch at a time.

For ISEA2017, we demonstrate how to graft urban fruit trees in the Recinto district of Manizales. The Guerrilla Grafters teach participants how to use their internet tools and different kinds of tagging — from graffiti to electronics to attach to branches (disseminating information about the graft to humans and bees), and offer take-home grafting kits. We provoke a discussion on how specific cultivation practices can resist capitalist and colonial regimes of power. Here, conflicts between a variety of fruit eaters might be recast as something to be embraced, and not positioned as the opposite to peace.

We invite messy, rebellious solutions to the ways information can be shared for the purposes of expanding the urban commons in ways that simultaneously collapse binaries between public and private, nature and culture.

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

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

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

This workshop is a unique blend of sensor systems lab exercises from neuroscience, media arts and design to context ideas. It was designed by Jill Scott to raise body awareness for those who are interested in neuroscience and cognition. It may help them incorporate users or interactive viewers in the actual processes of construction. Participants will have to apply in pairs so that they can physically work together and develop media art and digital design projects about sensory perception. Then meet virtually with the workshop members to hear presentations and compare their results.

The workshop pairs will be given exercises based on the understanding and stimulation of three neural systems, the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS), the Central Nervous System (CNS) and the Automated Nervous System. The aim is to help artists and designers think differently about sensory stimuli past simple interaction ideas of cause and effect, and to understand cross-modal sensory interaction and sensory anatomy.

The following themes will be explored: Sight | Observation, saccade movements, blink and light reflex reaction, the blind spot, visual acuity, eye dominance, visual impairment and photoreceptor adaptation. Taste | Understanding taste receptors, relation of taste to visual, olfactory response, trigeminal (hot, cool). Mechanical contributions to “sapictive” (taste) perception, location, distribution and thresholds of taste. Smell | The act of odour detection, smell and taste, adapted nostrils, somatic mapping, chemo-sensors and the role of cilia. Touch | Reception, distribution of touch receptors, tactile discrimination, temperature, pressure and vibration. Sound | Deafness, localization and eco-location, inner ear interpretation and action potentials, bone conduction and substitution. Proprioception | Balance reflex, relative position from tactility, movement and mind body centring, sensing the bodies edge and environmental effects on the body.

In the ISEA2010 Education Workshop the identification and discussion of specific key educational issues initiates the open exchange between educational experts and workshop participants. Roy Ascott’s introduction on pioneering platforms for Ph.D. studies forms the initial base for the exchange. The contribution by knowledge transfer experts concerns relevant learning methods and accreditation, including Ph.D. studies and novel incentives leading to hybrid learning and interdisciplinary practice. While some of the issues are more relevant in a regional context, over the last years an ongoing global discourse became evident on these topics.

Nina Czegledy – The Future of Education? Novel Incentives, Emerging Trends & Hybrid Practice

Lately, more and more academic institutions require lecturers with advanced degrees; yet obtaining these qualifications remains a problem in several countries of continental Europe – leading to fierce debates on educational circumstances. What is our role in this environment and how do we proceed? Roy Ascott’s Planetary Collegium initiative is a remarkable example
of a pioneering international platform for Ph.D. studies. His introduction to the ISEA2010 Education Workshop forms the base of the discussion on the complexity of these issues. It is recognized that the complexities include numerous significant items including packaged e-learning, various business models and social technologies for higher education etc. Within the scope of this workshop however – by pragmatic consideration – the discussion is focused predominantly on various aspects of Ph.D. studies and hybrid learning.

Workshop Statement

This workshop includes a basic introduction to the concepts of object oriented music programming languages. The material is presented from a musician’s point of view. Scheduling, event management and problem solving are discussed as well as score and tempo following and the control signal processing. The programs Perform and Max, both developed at IRCAM, will be featured and demonstrated. After the break, participants may apply some of the mornings theory in simple programming exercises.

The U.S. is falling ever further behind other nations with regard to broadband development and its related social, environmental, educational and economic opportunities. The opportunity is at hand for communities, institutions and business partners to take shared responsibility for fulfilling the promise of becoming content-rich, economically vital, quality-of-life enhancing, broadband-based ‘information societies’. This workshop will highlight open broadband initiatives in New Mexico, and will involve the audience in a general discussion of open networking.

Workshop Statement 

Open Source Estrogen combines do-it-yourself science, body and gender politics, and ecological ramifications of the present. It is a form of biotechnical civil disobedience. We do not seek techno-solutionism but instead, through the creation of a DIY estrogen protocol and increased endocrinological know-how, the project becomes a public platform for discussing the ethics of self-administering self-synthesized hormones, and a critique of the institutionalized control apparatus that defines current methods of hormone administration.

In response to the various biopolitics of hormonal control on female and trans bodies prescribed by governments and institutions, the Open Source Estrogen project is developing a system of DIY/DIWO protocols for the emancipation of the estrogen biomolecule.

This workshop will give participants the opportunity to detect and extract xenoestrogens from local waterways via a simple endocrine-disruptor detection system and the construction of a reverse-osmosis filtration system.

In particular we will examine three fundamental questions:

1. Can we look to bio-technoscientific capabilities for eradicating gender binaries in human society?
2. What does this say to the current reproductive havoc on aquatic species as a result of endocrine disrupting compounds in industrialized coastal zones?
3. Can we harness the potential to emancipate not only female, trans, and queer bodies from pharmaco capitalism and institutionalized hormones but also the bodies of non-human species, extending feminist health care across species of our shared environment?

The workshop is not intended to demonstrate a viable solution, instead offering participants a deepened sense of the complex intersection of culture, ecosystems, and body politics.

Please bring a water sample from a local waterway. 500ml-2000ml is suggested.

No prior knowledge is required.

Workshop Statement 

Programmed art is the definition given to the body of works by a group of Italian artists active between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. This definition was introduced by Bruno Munari and Umberto Eco in 1961 in the Almanacco Bompiani and used in 1962 on the occasion of an exhibition hosted at the Olivetti show room in Milan, featuring works by the artists of Gruppo T. Gruppo T pioneered the introduction of technology and of an algorithmic approach in the process of artistic production and their artworks embedded the utopia of an interactive democratic art made for everyone and open to everyone’s participation. Started in 2015, the project “Re-programmed art: an open manifesto” aimed at involving a group of digital artists in the process of reprogramming artworks by Gruppo T. The goal was to build prototypes of kinetic artifacts that would translate the main principles of Programmed Art into the codes of contemporary culture, following the tenets of peer production, namely open source hardware and software and digital fabrication technologies.

The workshop at ISEA2016 aims to open and foster the discussion of the application of open source design and open hardware approaches to support reproducibility, extension and further participatory developments of re-programmed artworks by the public at large. The workshop proposes an interactive format where participants will be involved in the process of creating an open source derivative of a kinetic programmed artwork through collaborative design sessions. The sessions are based on sketching and low-fi prototyping through electronic kits based on Arduino. A special focus will be on the documentation and the sharing through on-line community platforms dedicated to DIY projects. The hands-on activities will be facilitated in order to discuss on the topic of DIY and open source and their impact on interactive art preservation and investigation. The workshop program and the outputs will be documented on the official website of the project: reprogrammed-art.cc.

Participants have to bring their own laptops. Few technical information might be requested via email to registered participants. The workshop is open to scholars, artists, designers and students interested in the field of interactive art and collaborative practices. In particular, we seek for participants who are investigating or developing projects that reflects on DIY and open source practices in art and design as well as on alternative strategies for preserving and communicating media based art through on-line collaboration and community platforms. Furthermore, knowledge of programming and generative art and design tools is welcome even if the prototyping activities will not involve programming.

Ornamental Cactus Design is a hands-on workshop for learning simple cactus grafting techniques. We will create our own plant sculpture to take home. Cactus grafting, or cutting and pasting two different species of cacti is a common way to propagate the plant. This method is also used for making Moon Cactus – ornamental mini plants you can easily find in garden stores and flower markets. They are mass-produced, short lived, and are designed to look like flowers. We will discuss the history, ethics and aesthetics of this design to come up with our unique versions of it.

Workshop Statement

David Ward will help participants examine their fears and take steps to overcome them. The success rate is high.

Motion Lab is a framework for a public discussion of ideas related to performance, movements and media. Set in studio 3 of PACT, the Lab will feature specially invited guests and contributors who will present their papers and projects. Motion Lab will be facilitated by Scott deLahunta and Christopher Roman and will run thematically alongside and in association with the Synchronous Objects, reproduced installation located next door.

A reagent is a substance that produces a chemical reaction the moment it interacts with another. The result is a product with different characteristics and properties. Reagents are the basis for many activities related to applied sciences and are often used to detect or separate specific elements. They are classified according to their purity or specific use: reagents for analysis that are of lesser purity, pure and special used for analysis techniques. Hicham
Berrada has transferred its use to the field of art, shifting it from science and technology to a visual sphere, where experimentation becomes the center of the work, devoid of hypotheses to verify or substances to unveil. The scientific knowledge that Berrada applies in his visual experiments is naturally bound to his artistic practice, in the same way that a painter is
involved with supports, pigments and binders. Hicham Berrada will hold a workshop for artists based on their artistic practice, a cross between science and art.

An interactive exhibition of videos created in a series of workshops at cultural centers in two impoverished shantytowns in Buenos Aires and in an ISEA organization-based workshop in San Jose. Workshop participants use cheap disposable digital video cameras to document their daily lives and a custom-built web application that allows them to edit, tag and publish their video online. The workshop focuses on strategies for collective self-representation using software designed to allow participants to discover relationships and make connections between their personal stories. Thus, communities not traditionally thought of a scholarly or academic, produce and interpret knowledge using media and information technology.

Palabras employs the tactics of DIY technology and the philosophy of participatory culture by adapting and developing media and information technologies as tools for collective self-representation for a variety of communities.

The project was based on the concept of the ‘community computer’, first proposed by activist Bruno Tardieu. The ‘community computer’ is a social and technological system much like a typical computer system in which words can make things happen and associative memory evolves over time. While the ‘personal computer’ provides a communications gateway to the Internet where communities of interest can evolve regardless of distance, the concept of the ‘community computer’ is intended not to bypass, but to strengthen, communities of place?particularly marginalized communities – and to enable and empower them.

To this end inexpensive disposable digital video cameras were transformed into re-usable cameras (using instructions and free software found on a DIY technology website) and a web application was developed for editing, tagging and publishing the video produced with these cameras online. These tools were designed for use in workshops at two cultural centers that serve shantytown communities in Buenos Aires.

Workshop participants used the transformed disposable digital video cameras to document their daily lives. The workshop focused on strategies for collective self-representation using software designed to allow participants to discover relationships and make connections between their personal stories. Workshop participants worked in groups using this custom-designed free software to edit and organize their video clips. The workshop focused on strategies for collective self-representation and the software was designed specifically to allow the participants to discover relationships and make connections between their personal stories and images. The interface provides access to the videos through folksonomies (folk + taxonomies) participants create. Thus, communities not traditionally thought of a scholarly or academic, produce and interpret knowledge using media and information technology.

With  participants from El Envion at Villa Tranquilas and Fundacion Crear Vale la Pena in Buenos Aires, Community Works West, Children of lncarcerated Parents Proiect, San Francisco, CA

Related ISEA2006 Paper: Sharon Daniel – The Public Secret Information and Social Knowlegde

• Sharon Daniel (US) with project development team:
• Michael Dale (US), David Merino (US) & James Khazar (US) in California and
• Carlos Trilnick (AR) & Cecilia Velasquez Traut (AR) in Buenos Aires

We are interested in providing participants an introductory course in parametric and interactive design within an architectural environment. Computation has become ubiquitous, is embedded in virtually every facet of our lives and is currently showing real promise to augment of lives in the way that Engelbart, Sutherland, Beer, Ashby and Pask were dreaming of when they introduced us to cybernetics. Within the field of architecture, the contemporary digital discourse has gained a significant level of maturity over the past 30 years. Computers have been absorbed, adapted, modified and evolved into a robust infrastructure that is changing the landscape of design conception, development, simulation, engineering, management, communication, construction and of planning the life-cycle of a building. It is within this context that this workshop has been developed. The scope includes an introduction to; modeling with Grasshopper in Rhino, digital fabrication processes, and interaction with Arduino. The course is oriented for participants who are new to these technologies. This day long workshop should help each student obtain fundamentals in parametric modeling and interactivity

This workshop looks at how knowledge is shared through gestures and feelings by family members. It is informed by an ongoing project that collects recipes from Canadian immigrants and refugees, each touching on acknowledgment and formation of transnational identities within North America. This series explores multi-directional approaches to cultural food practices, the bodies that preserve them, and the media that moves this information within the viewing format of a transmedia essay film.

Knowledge of practice and feelings are carried across borders. The histories that are shared between parent and child, aunties, sisters, brothers, and chosen family are guided by multi-generational narratives that consist of bodies, things, events, and environments. We wish to highlight commonalities in transnational experiences while expanding on a specific type of intergenerational knowledge sharing— one that, at once, preserves approaches, information, and traditions, creates feeling for processes, smells, taste, as well as transforms, hybridizes and responds to contexts around food as a cultural practice.

This workshop applies a series of different data recording processes to represent dialogues weaved by collective experience to create an interface for diasporic identities to talk about migration, community, political conflicts, mourning, healing, and transformation. These technologies include photogrammetry, non-optical motion capturing, videography, and audio recording, all these techniques come together to support the oral testimonies, object-centred narratives, and transmedia storytelling. We are exploring the generative and expressive possibilities of recording rather than capturing and domesticating human movement through a scientific management of labour. We take note of how Eduardo Galeano reminds us that to remember (recordar) is to pass again (re) through the heart (corazón).

This workshop incorporates bioinformatic measurement technology to explore new modes of artistic expression that directly incorporate the senses as part of the medium of the work. The focus of this endeavour involves the tracking of a participant’s emotive inclination for use as an interactive modality in performance and computational art.

Emotional state data is gathered from a biosensing acquisition system and analyzed using custom software and hardware tools built on poplar platforms such as, Arduino, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, Ableton Live, TouchDesigner, and Processing. Physiological measures, such as Electrocardiography (ECG, heart rate), Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Electromyography (EMG, muscle), Electroencephalography (EEG, brain waves), Electrooculography (EOG, eye movement), and Respiratory effort (RSP, breathing) can be read. The tools explored provide the ability to control the presentation of audio-visual and haptic stimuli and monitor the physical reaction as nuanced by emotional state, blurring the line between auditory and visual virtual content and physical experience.

The workshop provides participants with a hands-on experience with our tools and methodologies that allow participants to explore several layers of activity within this work including:

1)The connection between the individual and physiological data, to see if it is possible to discover awareness with the systems of the body that are normally consciously ignored.
2)The connection made between two people, to see if there is a way that one can influence the embodiment of the other, and if the experience of embodiment can be shared.
3)The psychosocial potential of the combining of embodiment and physiological data by looking at how this technology could be used to explore group experiences, and the ability of a performer to affect the audience.
4)The role of affect and the environment, and how the participant or performer can have a biofeedback relationship with the audience and environment of an installation or performance.

Workshop Statement

[Remark: the Workshop was XXLD]

Description: The current corporate technology fervour over wearable technology that collects everyone’s intimate body data, under the pretence of medical or fitness monitoring, highlights that it is time to ask critical questions and raise concerns around the ethics of corporate ownership of this data for a consumerism and surveillance agenda.

As part of a larger collaboration by the authors, this workshop aims to draw the performance community into the development, evolution of, and conversation around wearable technology, data collection ethics. It is meant to bring performers and researchers together to develop methods of using both commercial and handmade wearable sensing and smart textiles-based devices that transmit physiological data, to create unique interactive performances. It also aims to engage performers actively in exploring ways in which wearable technologies might enhance performance, while making playful, challenging and thought-provoking performance works.

This workshop is an all day workshop with a focus on the performance making process, while incorporating physiological data into the final performance, as a way to express identity. It will feature exercises with performers, and have them work with pre-created DIY soft circuit sensors, as well as a selection of commercial devices, in order to move or control an output, such as sound, visuals or video. The day will be organised around introductions to wearable technology, improvisation activities, and exercises to enable performers to create interactivity with devices and sensors, and a short devising activity to allow participants to perform their own ideas.

This demo presents a single knitted textile cone (i.e. a petal) of the electronic sculpture-installation work by the authors entitled Flower Antenna, exhibited in Spring 2021 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City (MOMA). The work operates as a large receiving antenna that senses electromagnetic fields in the gallery space. Using a logarithmic amplifier circuit, electromagnetic fields are converted to sonic expressions heard in the installation space, revealing the site-specific electromagnetic atmosphere of the gallery. The demo presents textile antenna samples and EMF-sensing circuits designed throughout the development of the work.

Audience: Zayed University Students Only, Level: Foundation

Create a representation of a place in Dubai by working with the Artist to frame a scene and use still images to develop a series of commemorative cushions. Become part of a larger conversation about the implication of rapid development for all who live in Dubai.

CRITICAL INTERACTION DESIGN/PUBLIC SPACE PROJECT

The workshop takes place in a local community center Kontupiste at a suburb called Kontula in Helsinki. The focus of the workshop will be to introduce the participating primary school kids to a new way of playing with technology.

The workshop begins the engagement from traditional media forms and moves towards more interactive and networked media. The main issue that is addressed through the workshop is to understand ways in which we perceive technology and information via technology and how we understand others through them.

The process of the workshop will be on experiments and playful engagement with high and low technology. The emphasis is on fun and creative games working with content from popular culture, mass media and personal interests.

The intention is to illustrate a range of outcomes that are small and quick in order to keep the attention span of the kids through short experiments and immediate results.

Zayed University Students Only. Level: Foundation. Opportunitiy for students of Zayed University to learn from international electronic artists and thinkers.

An intensive workshop for women who are new to and/or interested in combining gaming and poetry as a medium for expression. Participants will create games or gamified experiences to elicit simple poetic expressions, personal narratives and kinetic textual poems through the game platform. This workshop is geared towards those who are new to programming and art games. The focus would be  on creating poetry that is interactive in some way, using the platforms’ inherent qualities.

Audience: ISEA2014 Delegates, Level: Intermediate

Learn how a multi-rotor drone can be used to produce commercial grade video and still photography from the air. Use of a Sony NEX7 camera mounted on an octocopter will be demonstrated. Post-processing of stills into 3D digital models and orthorectified photomosaics will also be demonstrated. The workshop will have time to discuss alternative configurations, and new opportunities that the technology may provide.

The aim of the workshop is to work on methods of participatory urban re-design and create slides and animations including art and cultural phenomena for the re-design of Durban city spaces. During the 3-4 hour workshop, participants will get information about video mapping techniques and learn about the animation creation for facade projections.

The workshop approaches what soundscape research is, history, the present, and change in sonic environment, soundscape design vs. sound design, how to use mobile tools in soundscape research, designing a soundscape, lectures, hands-on exercises, and discussion. From the research point of view the target of the workshops is to raise knowledge about soundscapes, sound memories and soundscape design. The sonic experience is a complex entirety but yet we all have similarities in experiencing sounds.

Paint Durban together with Durban! Weather by writing a message, making a drawing or a simple abstraction, people will be given the possibility to create their own mark in a public space with the help of digital tools. The collective painting will be made on a virtual background by using VR glasses and a controller, while simultaneously visible for the observers as a projection on a real nearby wall. By using a camera connected to the VR glasses, the users will be able to shoot a photo in the endless pallet of their real surrounding and choose local sights, objects, faces or random details as patterns for their painting. The city impressions will this way be inscribed in the very ink of their authors. Drawing on the symbolism of graffiti art, this participative public activity offers an opportunity for personal expression in urban space. However perishable and ephemeral on brick-and-mortar, we are wondering – can this virtual tool reproduce the contested terrains of the city walls while avoiding the controversies often attached to it? Can the virtual walls be vandalised? Can the virtually extended space be appropriated? Or do you just want to play? It´s your wall!

Two worlds, two spaces or cross borders – these titles bring us to the same concept about shifting between environments. Many changes could happen like changes in visuals, sounds and time. In this shift we will see many visions that can change our thoughts visually and conceptually and through these elements we will build our Machinima projects.

Workshop Statement

Developments in the production of all kinds of publications increase in speed and impact. Yet most traditional publication designers (books, newspapers, magazines, corporate identities) and their customers are not aware of these recent dramatic changes. Even designers for new media, such as blogs, websites, apps and e-books tend to see their work as local and separate. With a modest guessed increase in speed of 2.5 times, the next 10 years are comparable with the change, 25 years ago, from photo-typesetting to desktop publishing. These changes will continue, offering less time for users, customers, designers and producers to adapt their knowledge, experience and behavior. This will very likely result in a “shake-out” of designers- where the difference between the have and have-nots in knowledge becomes obvious. Designers that are not fully aware of these changes will find it hard to make their work needed in the future. Where by definition it is impossible to predict discontinued developments, it is feasible to envision technology driven developments by extrapolating what has happened in the past years. The workshop will address these issues from the perspective of the future of design (what will students be doing 40 years from now?) and the increasing wide range of platforms and devices (“tablet computers require new thinking and new methods of design and production”). Design the design process. The designer as integrator, instead of artist defining the color of the buttons. Some projects and cases are presented as optional directions. Based on inheriting object definitions in programming languages like Python and JavaScript it is possible to add abstraction layers to any publishing project. This way a clear separation can be made between the generic functions, reusable in other projects, and the small part of functions that are specific for one particular project. In general designers and programmers hardly take the effort to make this separation, resulting in local solutions that only work for one project. In the past years the Python library Xierpa (http://www.xierpa.com) has been developed as a publishing platform (often compared to a box of technical Lego) that allows rapid and flexible development of web-applications for publishing in print, online and apps. A standard XML descriptor file defines style, layout and behavior on a generic level, independent of platform and output device. The cases described in the workshop all fit the following set of requirements:

1. (Publishing) project must be compliant to all relevant standards;
2. Achieve as much separation as possible between content, design and technique;
3. The design should know/recognize user behavior and respond appropriate;
4. All unique information should only exist once.

Publishing solutions that fit all of these points cannot be file based. Only online tools that automate design on a high abstraction level will survive. And this does require designers to adapt to new thinking about their processes and tools. And this inevitably must lead to changes in design education.

This workshop will allow the general adult public to experience their cutaneous microbiome (micro-organisms that live on and in our skin) in a haptic -visual/olfactive- and intellectual reflection about our ubiquitous relationships of hate/love with this part of ourselves.

Participants will soak a piece of fabric in a culture broth and inoculate it with their cutaneous microbiome. We will use our lactobacilli to lacto-ferment vegetables and produce some safe and personal sauerkrauts, kimchi, and hot sauces. In the meantime, I explain principles from microbiology- and traditional cooking- to get safe cultures. Scientific data about our cutaneous microbiome will open a discussion on our physical relationships with it. Two weeks previously the workshop, participants will receive a shortlist of material to get before the activity and the culture broth recipe (it takes 30 min to prepare from ingredients found in any grocery store).

To illustrate possible troubleshooting with lacto-fermentation, I will show healthy and dubious cultures done a week before. The exploration of some pieces of fabric with microbial colonies from different microbiomes will allow us to enjoy their beauty and diversity. We will broadly determinate their microbial composition and interpret it. We will also explore our love/hate for our microbiome. We hate it, it is our smell, animality, but it wraps us from birth to death, protecting us, intimately connecting us to the outer world, and to itself (ourselves) in a queer relationship.

Radio Chigüiro was a social platform for the distribution of Lafayette, Indiana’s “glocal” culture. It operated as a community radio, exploring youth practices associated with parties, live music shows, and free radio workshops by using a web site as a medium for contact, production and participation. Using basic computers, participants will learn to produce their own radio programs. The objective of the workshop is to instruct in easy and free resources for audio recording, editing and broadcasting.

Presented by Robert Twomey & Ash Eliza Smith

With recent advancements in machine learning, researchers have demonstrated remarkable achievements in natural language understanding and synthesis. This event introduces large language models (LLMs) through a participatory workshop culminating in a live radio show and internet broadcast. We explore aspects of liveness and serendipity; possibilities for human/non-human co-authorship; and relate emerging computational tools to human language and perception, ultimately considering how LLMs can be tools for creativity, co-creation, and live performance.

The day-long workshop begins with an introduction to LLMs and generative text, then proceeds through a series of AI writers rooms, gaining experience with prompt authorship and interaction with GPT. We build towards human rehearsals of AI-generated text, culminating in a live radio show performance for both an in-person audience (30-40) and streamed to a large online audience. In this iteration, we build on previous workshops with the addition of live foley and real-time speech and voice synthesis. The final performance will be porous, inviting audience participation and involvement in shaping the development of the human/non-human radio drama.

Together these elements extend our research into performative AI and narrative systems design. As artists and researchers we are interested in how we might co-author and co-perform with AI in a meaningful way, hinging on liveness and collective entropy. We are not just interested in what it means to collectively co-author (beyond the individual), but rather what the ingredients of liveness, audience participation, live sound scoring, and acting and performance bring to creative and performative AI.

Our work ranges from real-time performance of audio and performance, speculative design, collective storytelling, live-action-role-play, and machine imagination.

Re-embodiment & Dis/abilities: Performing River is a workshop that explores immersive, ritualized, intimate movement experiences for mixed-ability participants willing to wear Oculus Quest2 VR headset as well as wearable sensors or fabrics. The participants are invited to examine their responses to sounds and tactile images (imagined relations) of water, river, flow, movement, liquidity – extending body (in whatever restricted, limited or possible way) to an interface between the real there, and the virtual nature drawings we shall instigate through our VR software and physical movement ideas.

We also plan to create experiments in inter-action – extending the notion of illustrating/drawing into the relationship between Oculus Quest headset wearer (performer) and illustrator/guide who hold the Oculus controllers and draws, in real time & in real flow. We understand such architectures as “kinetic atmospheres” which open up participatory scenarios, composed with fabrics, paper, drawing materials (graphite) as well as wearables, “design-in-motion” accoutrements or costumes created by Michèle Danjoux. Choreographic proposals (Xu, Birringer) emphasize sensorial and affective ritual engagements between performers and participant observers.

Performing River is ritual: The ethical questions raised by river/water – its availability, pollution, infrastructural dimension for local and wider trade – highlight that water is not just a metaphor of thinking practices, it is a site of deep contention and political crisis, as currents, floods, currencies, ecologies and economies flow together or collide. By exploring river (and flooding) as elemental, and water as vital infrastructure and inspiration for design as well as climate activism and consideration of habitats and ecospheres, this workshop reflects creatively on the function and circulation of this special medium in various cultures, examining its potential in fostering collective imaginaries.

How far into others/ beyond ‘you’ can your body extend in the hybrid worlds we inhabit?  What web-based conditions can provide a coalescing of varying practice and languages? What happens when they do? This workshop proposes three interrelated exercises to explore the involvement of the sensing body in machine-breathing-drawing-moving gestural entanglements from a critical and feminist standpoint that will culminate in a collective exhibition:

1)Kinesthesia: participants engage in corporeal explorations of stillness and movement to bring new forms of being in our bodies. Kinesthetic empathy can engage in and with another’s movement or sensorial experience of movement (Sklar). We will practice with performances by the Catalan artist Fina Miralles
2)Surrealists’ exquisite corpse: participants will draw parts of bodies, one by one without seeing the parts of the whole they will become part of. This will enable already collective or in-between fragmented states, playing with the possibility of entangling unconscious processes.
3)Mediated-Internet Body: participants will explore collective embodied compositions created through the collective mediated body. We will attempt this with a variety of gestural elements based on the previous 2 exercises and consider what we do and where we look while researching (note taking, shifting in our seats, managing browser tabs, etc.), using Zoom play: faux green screen, layering screenshot, etc.

This techno-body-experience workshop invokes series of minor gestures (Manning, 2016): gestures of care, of centering, body, self, hand drawing and playful engagement. It follows Sara Ahmed-ian lines such that each practice hones in on digital interaction and subsequently changes the affective response to each other—a re-orienting of our bodies. She points out: “when we follow specific lines, some things become reachable and others remain or even become out of reach” (2006, p.14). We co-compose a Bretch like-performance with multiple entry points of affective resonances and tonalities.

Workshop Statement

As a sound processing technique, Audio Morphing has existed for many years. However, with the recent increases in computing power this technique has become available in real time for musicians (non-engineers), providing them with an opportunity to explore unusual sound processing algorithms empirically, while offering additional signal processing choices for live performance situations. The authors have developed a real-time Audio Morphing application on the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation (ISPW). The application features an intuitive and straightforward user interface, and is intended for musicians (sound designers etc.). The application’s signal processing algorithms make use of Fast Fourier Transform-based re-synthesis (FFT, iFFT), and provide for high quality time-stretching, filtering, dynamic range processing, spectral shaping, cross-synthesis, and spatialization. These techniques allow users to project various features of one sound onto those of another, thus creating a new sound or “morph” which resembles the original sound–often in unexpected ways.This workshop is intended to provide participants with information and experience in Audio Morphing. The authors will present an overview of the technique and its applications, explaining the basic concepts in terms familiar to non-engineers with some studio experience. During the workshop the participants will have an opportunity to explore the techniques mentioned above, creating “audio morphs” of provided sound examples while following the tutorials developed by the authors.Just as morphing tore through the video world, audio-morphing has given electronic musicians and composers just as much to consider. This workshop given by prominent electronic musicians Zack Settel and Cort Lippe, begins to unravel the mysterious nature of the this new technology in REAL-TIME. Given in two half-day sessions.

Workshop Statement 

Context Engineering is concerned with the technological extension of the human condition through the investigation of the ethical use of emerging technologies to enhance human and cognitive capacities. The power to rapidly shift our perspective is becoming a new form of currency. Context Engineering provides the ability within one field of view, to be both in the world and to see yourself in it, the power of looking through and occupying, your own field of vision (Gibson, E. J. 2006).

Hybrid technology can directly shape how our brains interpret and experience reality.

The practice of Context Engineering produces ‘experience coders’ who manufacture content as direct sensory experience (context). One of the core concerns of Context Engineering is whether we can gain a significantly greater capacity to develop and influence our brain function and crucially if that will then help us to better understand the reality that the brain creates. As a result there is an ethical responsibility to context engineer with as much knowledge of the affordances and dangers of these technologies and techniques as possible.

This workshop on Contextual Engineering will investigate hybrid technologies and techniques that combine the affordances of the analogue with the digital to enable a new era of Hyper Function, Sensory Augmentation and Perceptual Adaptation. Context Engineering will give us new abilities, control over our senses and the ability to develop new forms of perception, providing us with a new type of self-control. HCI that relies predominantly on vision alone or the engagement of a limited range of senses can cause individual (and by implication – societal) dissonance creating a diminished rather than an augmented reality. To counteract this, making more of the context available for human centred augmentation is crucial. Greater immersion (involving all the senses) will lead to entirely new states of awareness. The game ‘Blood Sport’ increases the sense of immersion by removing actual blood from your body in the physical space whenever you get hit or killed in the virtual space. Context Engineering only actually occurs when that blood is then donated, to activate the societal benefit. This example provides a potential working definition for Context Engineering: when the content introduced has the power to completely augment the whole context then Context Engineering is achieved.

Context engineering creates a new economy where we focus less on transforming content (as the primary activity), and more on how we can make our own perception the ‘content’. This is made possible by new advances in various fields including biotech, neuro-electronics and mixed reality technologies meaning that the lenses through which we experience the world are becoming more adjustable than ever. Products are being developed to intentionally manipulate various components of our own physiology. For instance f.lux modifies the computer’s display colour wavelength to shift with the natural external light, reducing potential circadian rhythm problems that can develop from using devices at night. These subtle shifts can produce real changes in our bodies. Other examples and applications of context engineering include: New auditory systems, new visual systems, combining senses, adjustable senses.

Timetable

The session will start with the exploration of Hybrid (VR and AR) technologies to enhance our perception and help us see, hear, and feel our environments in new and enriched ways. During the second half of the workshop we will create resources, collaborative processes and methodologies for the design of hybrid (analogue and digital) interventions.

Interaction

The core problem is how to (re)design a workable balance between digital and analogue modes of interaction. Without thoughtful design, digital interventions are simply distracting people away from meaningful engagement with the learning opportunities and social situations that they are actually designed to augment. This workshop will enable the exploration of potential methodologies, structures and actions between the participants. The overall intention is to use hybrid technologies, techniques and methodologies to deeply analyze how a Hybrid Ecology Framework can be developed.

Takeaway

The take away will include the Context Engineering Hybrid Ecology Framework which will evolve in relation to the following questions for workshop: How adaptable is our perception? How neuro-plastic is the brain, what are the biological risks of Context Engineering? How can hybrid technological devices, of often-prosthetic alienation, help us to reconnect to ourselves and to the surrounding environment? How important is immersion for over coming and subverting the human condition? To what extent can content create context? How can we find an appropriate balance in this hybrid environment?

Outcomes

This workshop will look beyond augmented reality to the latest hybrid technologies and techniques that are enabling a new era of Sensory Augmentation, Perceptual Adaptation and Context Engineering. The ability to alter our senses and develop entirely new ones provides us with the possibility of creating new forms of pedagogy and knowledge. The outcomes of the session will be distributed amongst the participants and placed online

Interests in hybrid/trans tech, post-humanism and exploring the human condition are relevant and useful but not a requirement.

The workshop Recombinant ORAI is concentrated on the influence of technoscientific change upon society, hence the ideological, social and ethical discourses of Genetic Engineering (GM Food, Human Genome Project, etc.), and the cross-issues of biotechnological research, informatics, industrialization, and techno-utilization. The project also takes into account the spreading of Bio-Sciences (including flourishing biobusiness, genetic databanks, security issues) and the reception by media, and the public. The workshop takes into consideration the Nagoya Orai book. This will represent a successful immersive educational experience for interested participants.To sum up, the proposed workshop will culminate in the construction of a random and collaborative sequence of DNA that would come up from the Nagoya Orai book, which will then, inserted into the K-12 E. Coli genome (or similar).

The workshop Recombinant ORAI is concentrated on the influence of technoscientific change upon society, hence the ideological, social and ethical discourses of Genetic Engineering (GM Food, Human Genome Project, etc.), and the cross-issues of biotechnological research, informatics, industrialization, and techno-utilization. The project also takes into account the spreading of Bio-Sciences (including flourishing biobusiness, genetic databanks, security issues) and the reception by media, and the public. The workshop takes into consideration the Nagoya Orai book. This will represent a successful immersive educational experience for interested participants.To sum up, the proposed workshop will culminate in the construction of a random and collaborative sequence of DNA that would come up from the Nagoya Orai book, which will then, inserted into the K-12 E. Coli genome (or similar).

On average Americans throw away seven pounds of trash a day causing the US to make up 30% of the trash in the world. By educating individuals on the ways to properly recycle we can reduce this amount. We present the VR game Recycle or Die where users are forced to recycle. In this game we provide various recyclable and nonrecyclable materials accompanied with information on how to properly recycle these materials. User study results indicate that the game is enjoyable and informs on various items that can and cannot be recycled.

An installation and workshop that fuses geophysical and cultural mapping to create a multi-level locative vision of an expansive present.

Audience: Public, Level: Foundation

The Reinvention of the Vernacular is envisioned as an interactive workshop on site-specific interventions merging historical architecture with contemporary art and new media. While much has been written on the iconicity of art and architecture as globally branded phenomena, this workshop proposes a strategic reversal of emphasis to examine the deeper and more perplexing issue of the local in a context in which particularities of both person and place are under immense pressure. How can art, design and architecture contribute to a unique local identity in an age of global branding? How can we achieve a synthesis between regional culture and global impact by bridging new media, ancient techniques and advanced technologies? How can we challenge image-oriented art in favor of spatial and experiential interventions that relate to place? And most importantly, how can we utilize site-specific interventions to create an aura of mystery, discovery, and a sense of arrival in that particular place in that particular country? This workshop focuses on the Reinvention of the Vernacular by taking the Asir Region in Saudi Arabia as an area of intervention. As a pioneer bridge building project, we envision to transform one abandoned village in the Abha region of Asir into a multi-sensorial art installation animated by projections, color and sound. This installation will be powered by solar energy and operate ‘off the grid’.

WIRELESS EXPERIENCE

Renga is a practice originating from medieval Japan, based upon collecive activity and linked-verse – each person contributes a poetic fragment which, when combined, creates a whole poem. Aware present their own contemporary experience of a renga session in the immediate surroundings of Arabiaranta.

The collaboration between our multi-disciplinary group of 7 persons (John Evns, Iiris Konttinen, Meri Laitinen, Susanna Neiglick, Renita Niemi, Andrew Paterson, Niko Pyrhonen) began with sessions in June/July 2004, introducing renga rules, collaborative tools, self-documentation, design practice, mobile Media projects and systems.

In mid-July, we shifted into an intensive workshop at a summer cottage, near Turku. Here we experimented with rapid-prototyping, exploring rules, logic and wireless media engagement. During this period, sonic media artist Sophea Lerner (AU/FI) joined the process as a ‘renga mistress’ for the group. Upon our return to Helsinki, we took part in renga sessions over limited time durations, in a specific location – Arabiaranta. These were archived using the Aware platform, including the significant contextual metadata of the activity.

We invite small audience groups to the situated context of engagement for a guided tour (30-45 minutes) based on the group’s experience and memory of the collaborative session, a practice we call ‘rengo’.

Aware developed as a multidisciplinary project initiated by John Evans (UK/FI), Markus Ort (CH/DE), Aki-Ville Poykio (FI) & ndrew Paterson (UK/FI)at Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki. Mika Raento (FI), CONTEXT group researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, contributes to the rengo project as a technical collaborator.

There is often an epistemic disconnect between the steps of field studies, laboratory analysis, and data communication in scientific and academic studies. This project addresses this disconnect by creating a sculpture that reveals environmental data as a spectrum and references the environment where it was recorded. Planes is a proposed artwork that displays data from a specific ecological study. The design is for a sculpture that depicts hydrogeochemical data as color on laser-etched panels. An LED and microcontroller system illuminate these fins. The artists’ aesthetic is a response to previously ineffective  two-dimensional graphs that held information but failed to communicate on a broad level. Planes intends to reunite the data with the spatial world and connect it with the phenomenological. Rather than the language of mathematical symbolism, this work explores what is possible when information is presented using color. As a sculptural piece, this work goes beyond the world where most data representation resides and innovates the way data is communicated, creating a space for experimentation and variability. This method provides a more meaningful way to communicate the results of a specific scientific study and acts as an exploration of conceptualization methods that can apply to other issues.

INVITED COMMENTARY

City councils are getting smart to the idea that our relationship to the world is partly determined by how we construct the world in our imaginations. Progressive cities of the 21st century are alive to the cultural advantages that can spring from creative channeling of public funds into community engagement.
The challenge that the City Data Slam in Sydney presented to artists was to make flat and uninspiring data – drawn from a variety of council databases – meaningful. The council was looking for new ways to enthuse, amuse and inspire the public to keep them on a long journey. Eight projects were established at the data slam by different artist teams and facilitators.
While these projects demonstrate the capacity for collectivised artistic practice, they also clarify a number of issues that governments and councils could keep in mind when considering the question of system feedback. Ordinary infrastructure can become green infrastructure if it is designed for environmental intelligence reporting. Moreover, better community engagement can arise from consideration of the following ‘data slam’ findings: (i) vital data is often hidden, illegible, or insensible; data is often lost in labyrinthine websites; data needs to be released and expressed in the public domain; (ii) to make data more tangible and environmentally literate, the question of ‘place’ and ‘community’ can be understood as triggers to incentivise sustainable behaviour.
How we identify scales of positive cooperation by creatively interpreting data sources is key to understanding how we identify with communities, how we share space and share destiny. This is the touchstone for moving from data to intelligence, to move from numbers to narratives. It is also central to the move from local to global scales of perception as a means to engage communities and create contexts for environmental behaviour change, placemaking, and connections with governments and politics. The Carbon Arts ‘data slam’ offered guided narratives with freedom to explore the consolidated and freshly aggregated data sets. Such ethical treatment of publically owned and yet inaccessible information could be read as one aspect of ‘open data’.
Two philosophical points became apparent during conversations held at the slam: (i) data is not an end in itself, it is an artefact that performs a mediating role between stakeholders; (ii) data can be represented in two forms: explanatory and exploratory. The first creates a narrative to behaviours behind the resultant findings as understood within the parameters of the project. The second encourages the extensive use of data, for it to be passed on to other interpreters and to remain alive and of use with distinct modes of inquiry.
At the Vivid Festival of Light, Music and Ideas, Jonathon Harris suggested that ‘beautiful’ data is not measurement but illumination. To illuminate is to be sensitive to context, to history; Harris: ‘data is the memory of our evolving human super-organism.’ While proactive councils are working to improve their monitoring systems, modes of measurement, and forms of benchmarking, progressive councils are thinking more expansively on ways in which they can incorporate the micro and the macro. They are critically reflecting on the related processes of data collection and aesthetic representation of data. The next step is to identify limited emotional responses to absolute data, and to articulate the empowering capacity of open data sets charged by seasonal patterns.
The Carbon Arts data slam – a dynamic, innovative and engaging interpretation of static data – understood that there are many complexities to the idea that knowledge is created once the extraction of information from data becomes evident to the imagination and the senses.

Living Capsules is the umbrella name we give to our art pieces. These are being born out of an ongoing cross-disciplinary collaboration between haptic and sound artists and a sociologist who share interests in the relations between senses, bodies, and technologies. In this workshop we reflect on how we are blending our practices through material and sensory engagements. In doing so we share some of our recent research together.

Our workshop would be presented in two parts. First we will enter a conceptual space of biohybrid and biofabricated systems of the future. Encountering the critical question: how might we come to live with Living Machines? We will reflect on our process of revealing that guided our explorations, generating new data from biomaterials that we sonified. We shall experiment with modes of listening and hearing with immersive audio practices.

Secondly, we will teach some sonification techniques that we used to bring new life to our biomaterials. You will have the opportunity to create sounds, individually or in groups, using the diversity of data collected – or working with pre-given sets.

During the workshop we will create sound pieces as Living Capsules. We will listen to, and hear, these work-in-progress pieces together at the end of the workshop. The idea of our sonified Living Capsules is to express futures where data and machines differently inhabit or intimately relate to our bodies. The aim of this experiment is to disrupt how our audiences sense technology as living and/or non-living and critically reflect on body–technology–society relations, both now and in the future.

Workshop Statement

During this workshop in Istanbul, we will question the “Mechanical Turk”, the strange online service offered by Amazon since 2005. If the history of the Mechanical Turk goes back to the 18th century, it has for the moment nothing to do with Turkey. The name comes from a chess player automaton dressed in an oriental costume. The Turk could play, and even beat his human opponents. It was only after a few decades that the trick was revealed: a human chess player, hidden in the false bottom of the table, was moving the pieces. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk takes up this idea, metaphorically, with the concept of “artificial artificial intelligence”. An online interface allocates the tasks to anonymous human beings, known as “Turks”, who complete “HITs” (Human Intelligence Tasks). Under the guise of an experiment on the intelligence of crowds, the Mechanical Turk democratizes the tools of ultralberalism. It is the most famous of the online labour markets, known as “webshoring” systems. These are often described as “virtual sweatshops”, since they allow anyone the possibility of having work done for a trivial sum, shifting the site of employment without any regard for regulation or social rights. This used to be possible only for the multinational companies. By choosing the name “Mechanical Turk”, Amazon clearly indicates where they see the employee: hidden and huddled up inside the machine. This phony human-powered AI represents the cutting-edge of a globalised lumpenproletariat, a world in which more and more useless human beings hide inside machines that exploit their intelligence. The Mechanical Turk turns the workforce into a dystopian science-fiction. During the workshop, we will use the Mechanical Turk backwards, to produce its own political critique: a film played by modern slaves. We will ask Turks to film themselves, using their webcam. They will act and read texts on relocation and outsourcing, the virtualization of work, and multitasking. Participants to the workshop will cast and direct the actors. They will help choose the texts and question this new form of globalisation. To paraphrase Jean Cocteau: Seeing as these things are beyond us, let’s pretend to organise them. The script will be written by Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon, based on a selection of excerpts taken from various sources, including the Mechanical Turk worker’s “union”, newspaper articles, texts by classic economists, stories of Mechanical Turk workers blogs, but also texts by Amazon AI researchers etc.

Workshop Statement

This workshop will be offering the participants both a theoretical and practical introduction to interactive narratives in ‘419-fictional environments’ created by scammers and scambaiters. We seek to understand different sides of online fraud and through creative storytelling reflect on issues like online privacy, virtual representation and trust within networks. We also draw parallels to other practices and cultures like: gaming, transmedia storytelling or creative activism. Through a participants take the first steps of creating their fictional characters and infiltrating a scammers storyworld to observe and interrupt their workflow. We explore how persuasive narratives are setup, how characters are designed and how dialog is exchanged to build trust between the acting parties. We will use social media and various content generators and other tools to orchestrate internet fiction, creating entrance points to a story world and spreading traces of information online. By reflecting on scam bait experiences we enter a discussion around the topic of interactive narration connecting to the participants’ and their general work in this field. Duration: Half Day

Within the framework of ISEA 2022, the artist Samira Benini Allauoat will present “GEO-LLUM”, an artistic research project part of S+T+ARTS Residences Repairing the Present / CCCB.

The purpose of this residence is the development of a public installation/sculpture that will generate energy through collaboration with bacteria that live in the soil (Geobarcters), being in turn a device that lights up the city and a soil decontaminant.

As part of the presentation, we will develop an open talk with the artist and a group of specialists linked to the investigation. This talk will be moderated by the curator María Ptqk – Doctor in Artistic Research specializing in the intersections between art and science – who is the S+T+ARTS-CCCB advisor for the “Cities of Microorganisms” call. They will participate in the talk: Carmen Tanaka – representative of Akasha Hub – collaborating institution of the project and venue of execution of the artistic residency; Lorenzo Patuzzo, engineer specialized in industrial design; and José Carvajal Arroyo, microbiologist from the BIOE research group, a laboratory focused on studying the scientific bases and applications derived from the interactions of electroactive microorganisms.

Then we will carry out an educational workshop guided by the artist and the microbiologist José Carvajal from the Bioe Laboratory (Alcalá). This activity will explain how we can use electroactive bacteria (Geobacters) to generate electricity, through the construction and explanation of the operation of an MFC – Microbial Fuel Cell (microbial battery). This presentation will be accompanied by a graphic explanation with the fundamentals of the workshop. The public will be invited to interact, learn and see the many simple components that are part of this process.

full-day hands-on workshop

Introduces participants to the Korsakow System, an easy-to-learn program for creating sophisticated interactive narratives, which does not require an actual database, or programming knowledge.

Workshop Statement

Make and plan collaborative science art! This hack day will apply the hackathon methodology to science art. Participants will collaborate with others to design and make science art projects with a view to continued development beyond the ISEA2015 conference. To participate all you need is an interest in science art and a willingness to think creatively and collaboratively. Participants will work individually or in small teams to propose science art works that can be pursued following the conference. If participants have materials available on hand, they will create works during the hackathon. Participants will have the opportunity to present their proposals or works to the gathering at the end of the day.

Audience: Public. Level: Intermediate Musicians

The workshop is geared towards play and experimentation with a new instrument called “Seaboard” and is targeted towards musicians and electronic artists. Discussion on the potential uses of the Seaboard as an expressive instrument for other mediums, such as light and physical objects connected via MIDI, will lead to a jam session, where musicians can experiment with the Seaboard and play with their fellow musicians.

Musicians are free to bring their own instrument, provided it is not a bassoon.

In a search for the dark corners of lit cities we find ourselves searching the spaces between the rigidity of the organized systems and the city grids. We look for the respite from the connected, surveilled and illuminated spaces in an attempt to find and celebrate darkness and silence. Part of this search is to experience these found spaces, attempt to capture them in image and sound, acknowledge their juxtaposition to their surrounding activity, map them onto the city grid and publish these findings. This performative workshop and performance installation is in line with a trajectory of the artist’s 10 years of light interventions and community engagement projects questioning the meaning of darkness and silence in the context of South Africa, across Africa and Europe. The play of darkness and light is one that is not only easily accessible to participants and audiences, but can be read as highly critical of social conditions and behaviour, the power of politics and propaganda, and evidence of control and surveillance.

We now collect huge amounts of data – about energy and water usage, about waste and about the various programs we have like green roofs and car sharing. It’s vital information, and we duly publish it on our website and in regular reports. But frankly, it’s hard to get people interested or excited by it. So this is where artists come in. For the City Data Slam we asked twelve artists to bring the figures to life in ways that illuminate and celebrate our collective efforts to deal with environmental challenges.

The City Data Slam at ISEA2013 has been one giant jam session, with the brief to turn boring data into beautiful art. It’s about finding ways to engage people, to make them care, to show how all those tiny, almost invisible actions can actually amount to significant changes in our world. Artists can play a key role here, opening our minds to new possibilities, as recognised in our recently released Creative City discussion paper.

The City of Sydney was delighted to have joined with ISEA2013, with Carbon Arts and Object Gallery to launch Sensing Sydney, a project to communicate sustainability through the arts, open data and public space. I’d like to thank all of the participants in the City Data Slam and indeed, in this international symposium on electronic art. Artists really do make a difference.

Turn e-waste into contemporary planters! Server Farms are, in their simplest form, computers and other technological equipment repurposed as planters. A gutted iMac, face up, where the screen and motherboard are replaced with wheat grass. A Mac Pro growing cacti and succulents, embedded in sand. A Dell, filled with house plants. Each of these is pictured above. We root trees in laptops, grow molds and fungi in and around tablets, inject watches, phones, and cameras with spores and microscopic life – then let each flower, flourish, incubate, and spread. What life may spur, how might techno-minerals diffuse? Bring your old computers, phones, and tablets, some plants, dirt, and/or seed, and we will help you along!

Along with Phossils and Re:Cyclings (forthcoming), Server Farms are part of The World After Us: a new series and exhibition of media sculptures that materially speculate on what our devices – phones and tablets, batteries and displays, etc – might become, over thousands or millions of years. Through research, experimentation, and craft, the team, led by Nathaniel Stern, along with Jenna Marti, Sam Tan, and Olivia Overturf, has tried to turn phones into crude oil, coal, or other fossil fuels – and put the results on exhibit, in beakers and tubes (Phossils). We attempt to mimic geological time, as pressure and heat, with earth and clay – through chemical interactions or specialized machinery – on laptops and tablets, then display where that potential lies, as petrified-like LCDs or mangled post-exploded batteries, on pedestals in a gallery (also Phossils). We will also turn ground phones into usable supplies – for example, color for ink and pulp for paper – and put these to use in these new forms: in the cases given, as fine art prints (Re:Cyclings).

Shoptalk: Field Tools for Critical Making engages participants to practice methods of thinking and making to promote social resiliency, art for social change, and participatory action for peace. This halfday workshop will give participants the opportunity to collaborate and build their own submissions for the Field Tools for Peace ISEA exhibition and online gallery, and explore new approaches to making. Workshop leaders will start with short presentations about their own community arts practices and case study overviews. Workshop participants will then have the opportunity to introduce themselves and brainstorm topics and mediums to create projects with. Methods for collaboration through rapid prototyping and problem solving will include creative acts of listening, and shared narratives and visions of possible futures in both digital and public art installation.

Shoptalk: Field Tools for Critical Making looks beyond solo authorship to explore and practice processes for collaborative making; identifying and establishing new toolkits for peace and safety; tools for engaging digital communities in meaningful ways; creating practices of identity and disguisement in precarious situations; and creatively exploring and establishing practical and theoretical relationships with peace and nature. This workshop will be translated into both Spanish and English by one of the bilingual workshop facilitators.

For artists working with sound technologies ‘signal processing’ is a familiar concept, which refers to the ways in which we mechanically or electronically manipulate an audio signal to change the sounds we hear. But how is sound involved in the social processes and signals we send each other in public spaces?

Workshop Statement

Join us for an afternoon with the robots in the Signs of Life: Robot Incubator exhibition. This special event takes you behind the scenes with the robots, artists and curator and will include artist talks, robot demonstrations and special activities. Get acquainted  with Mari Velonaki’s humanoid robot Diamandini and contribute to the next stage of her development. Psycholanalyse John Tonkin’s nervous robots and the other robots in the exhibition. Watch a special performance of Kirsty Boyle’s robot tree ceremony and interact with her hand crafted fragment robots. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

1. Mari Velonaki – Diamandini (2011-2013)
   Diamandini is a 155cm tall custom-made humanoid robot incorporating an omni-directional wheeled motion platform; cameras, laser scanners and computers for real-time tracking and installation control. The humanoid robot is being developed through a five year research project between Mari Velonaki and robotics scientists at the Centre for Social Robotics, Australian Centre for Field Robotics, the University of Sydney. Diamandini will be making her first exhibition appearance in the Signs of Life: Robot Incubator exhibition as a work in progress. Spectators enter an installation space where a kinetic sculpture is moving about in a smooth, choreographed manner. The kinetic sculpture is a robot that resembles a small-scale female figure that does not bear any elements that would classify her as a typical android robot. The texture that covers the robot from her head to the hem of her long dress is porcelain-like, and makes her look more like a floating figurine rather than a robot. Her movement is accompanied by soundscapes generated from within her. When a spectator approaches the figurine she responds physically by turning towards the person and gently moving closer to them. Supported by: Australia Research Council and Centre for Social Robotics/ Australian Centre for Field Robotics, The University of Sydney.
2. John Tonkin – nervous robots (2011)
   The robots are from John Tonkin’s nervous robots series. He is interested in how cybernetics has been used to construct computational models of different mental processes. His dysfunctional robots will explore some of these computational models of mind, awkwardly hybridising bottom-up AI approaches with more classical symbolic approaches that draw from a folk psychology conception of the mind as being the home of internal mental processes such as motives, desires, phobias and neuroses. attached/detached consists of two small autonomous robots that go through an ever shifting interplay of neediness and dismissiveness; with occasional moments of mutual happiness. These robots are primarily focussed on seeking or avoiding each other and will be oblivious to the audience. They draw on research by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth into attachment styles in adult romantic relationships. These different styles (secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant and fearful-avoidant) corresponded to different combinations of a person’s attitudes (positive or negative) towards themself and towards their partner.
3. Kirsty Boyle – tree ceremony (2011) and fragment (2009-2011)
   Tree ceremony involves a robot interacting with a tree, creating an environment exploring how technology might bring us closer to nature. The work was commissioned by the Tinguely Museum and the Kunsthaus Graz for the touring ‘Robot Dreams’ exhibition, and comes direct to Istanbul from the ‘Puppen – Projectionsfiguren in der Kunst’ exhibition at museum villa rot in Germany. Fragment is a series of interactive modular robots, handcrafted in a range of different materials.  During the Signs of Life  exhibition a new series of robots will be developed that explore a range of differing aesthetic and gestural representations of artificial life manifested as performance machines.

Workshop Statement

Several simulation techniques, and especially the use of physically based modelling and robotics, will be explained. The artistic application of these simulation techniques will be discussed. An introduction in several of these animation techniques will be followed by hands-on sessions on a network of Apollo workstations at SCAN, using mainly in-house software.

An overview of Softimage 3D graphics software version. 3.0 by Microsoft and its different modules, including modeling, animation and image rendering.

SolarCircus (2009-2012) is an interdisciplinary platform for eco-dialogue about the future of renewable energy. At ISEA2012, SolarCircus will take the form of a fun, two-hour, hands-on workshop. The workshop facilitator, Tiffany Holmes, will introduce participants to the mysteries and potentials of solar power in the first 15 minutes. All participants build a solar toy from a kit and then “hack” it to create a one-of-a-kind kinetic sculpture. In the last fifteen minutes, the class will assemble the sculptures outdoors as a sun-powered street intervention.

This 90-minute participatory session engages participants in a process of visionary social storytelling around the collective struggle required to win our utopia — utilizing the artist’s tabletop game, Solarpunk Futures. The game employs backcasting in a “Festival of Remembrance”, whereby Assemblies for the Future (groups of 4-6 players) play for 40 minutes from the perspective of a future utopia in which they collectively “remember” how their Ancestors utilized Tools and Values to overcome a real-world Challenge. Assemblies will report back on the form of their utopian scenarios, insights gained along the way, and how their experiences might inform their present-day actions.

Through the game, players engage in the serious yet joyful play of dialogue on the nature of the Challenges we face (e.g. Hunger, Water Crisis, Police Violence), the role of individual Ancestors, the constraints and opportunities presented by different Tools, the forces of opposition the Ancestors had to face, the ways different Ancestor roles, Values, and Tools emergently interweave, and more. Players embody positions of historical consequence while — via Tool cards featuring quotes from figures such as Rosa Luxembourg, Fred Hampton, Murray Bookchin, and Ursula K. LeGuin among many others — engaging with contemporary and historical revolutionary concepts from our global legacy of freedom.

Solarpunk Surf Club (est. 2020, United States) is an artist collective that creates and curates egalitarian platforms for surfing the waves of still-possible worlds. We elaborate on social ecological aesthetics AKA solarpunk in order to politicize, historicize, and demystify our collective utopian future. Solarpunk Surf Club has presented projects internationally in galleries, museums, festivals, conferences, libraries, activist gatherings, and forest occupations. In 2022, our collective received the Future Art Award: ECOSYSTEM X from MOZAIK Philanthropy (Los Angeles) for our artist’s game, Solarpunk Futures.  

ISEA98 Associated Event. Places for up to 15 trainees, four weeks from late August ’98.

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

A one day workshop focusing on recording problems and studio techniques from the visual artist’s point of view.

Artist-run spaces, also called DIY Spaces or Alternative Spaces are creative communities operating on the margins of cultural institutions. They exist in a precarious space, affected by the economy, pandemic, and gentrification.

While artist-run communities of pre-internet eras are documented through physical media such as photographic prints, video, and publications, recent communities are primarily promoted and documented online. This very nature makes it hard to preserve their activities. As platforms alter their business models, websites go down, and browsers change their settings and standards over time, the activities and exhibits of artist-run spaces are in danger of disappearing forever.

Archiving Artist-Run Spaces is a project to preserve these communities in the era of born-digital media, providing tools, models for preservation and partnerships with longstanding archives invested in digital preservation. The project consists of created digital archives and a toolkit for artist-run organizations providing information, training, tools and other resources.

This project proposes and demonstrates a model of digitally archiving artist-run spaces, created with nascent concepts and practices of permacomputation to build modular, resilient, duplicated and networked archives both for the micro communities on their own as well as for a general public, artists, researchers and historians.

Workshop Statement

In 1988, we co-organised with Anne-Marie Duguet, Maurice Benayoun and other colleagues from the University of Paris 1 the international symposium PLEIAS (Perspectives de Liaisons Europeennes Images  et Arts de Synthese). The symposium was held at La Sorbonne (Amphitheatre Richelieu) and assembled all important European Scholars and Artists at the time, giving birth to multiple collaborations in the field of Computer Arts. Participants in this symposium are now heads of important Art and Research Centers worldwide and actively participate in joint activities. During 2010, we proposed to four European Laboratories to dress an international panorama of these activities and build a reference portal to support a network of  excellence in interactive art.  These laboratories are the following (in parenthesis the name of the active researcher supporting the project):

1. Laboratoire des Arts et Medias -LAM, University of Paris 1 (Anne-Marie Duguet)
2. CITU- University of Paris 8 (Maurice Benayoun)
3. LECAD – EPEOT, University of Thessaly (George Papakonstantinou)
4. Interaction Design, University of the Aegean (P. Kyriakoulakos)

Our intention is to broaden the normally bilateral aspect of these collaborations into an international network of excellence in interactive arts in order to provide artists, curators, scholars and researchers with a reference meeting point for design and implementation of ambitious projects. ISEA2011 in Istanbul could offer the opportunity to launch this network of excellence by giving the tribune to 12-20 leaders of university laboratories worldwide to present their actual activities, present their goals for the future and set the standards for the operation of this network. In order to participate in this workshop, researchers will be invited to present their laboratories, the technological infrastructure, research directions, previous work with artists, and their operational capacity for international cooperation. A limited number of interactive artists will be invited in the workshop in order to present the artistic point-of-view regarding the implementation of the artistic work in a research framework. After short presentations of the laboratories (10 min max per participant), a discussion will focus on operational issues: cooperation agreements, appropriate procedures to launch projects, financing issues, implementation schedule, measurable goals and deliverables for a pilot period. Thanks to the contributions of all participants and attendants, the new PLEIAS (Peering Laboratories in Europe for Interactive Art Synergies) network should be able to schedule and implement a project with two main objectives: provide a large database on interactive art and motivate collaborations between artists and researchers through the realisation of interactive art projects.

Workshop Statement

Momentous places and stories become a visual network of stories in the megacity Istanbul and blogosphere. Swarm Istanbul is an interactive movie about being in Istanbul. Emotional map presents life and living.  Swarms of people, short stories and streaming resources networks city with energy that will be presented through an interactive map. The workshop connects physical cityscape to virtual cityscape and allows people to navigate through localized videos to referring videos of same place and similar kind of events in social media and videos. It can be navigated through webpage with laptop or mobile. Participants will learn to do own visual and auditive content from their important places and embed them to their own maps and data streams. The philosophy of documenting the environment is partly derived from ideas based on work of R. Murray Schaeffer and the subject of acoustic ecology. Core idea of the workshop is to hack the notion of city towards self generated geographical and mental map of place rather than environment or notion of public space controlled by authority and media. The work  adopts its background from open source and DIY approach. It allows and hopefully encourages people to build similar kinds of documentary inspired works and maps from their own urban territories. Groups of people in theworkshop will explore the city of Istanbul from their own perspectives with personal mobile cameras and/or tools that can be provided by organizers. Collected visual and sonic data is edited and located to modified map through a collaborative work process. Collection of short films ranging from abstract short glimpses of notions of city to short stories of individual important places is placed to web via google maps, to present a collection of personal views growing as unique small interactive movie about Istanbul. Participants need laptops and mobile devices with cameras or/digital cameras.

Workshop Statement

This workshop will be dedicated to constructions of touch-reactive noise machines. Such devices, based on a simple amplifier chip, are able to produce a variety unexpected tones and textures, depending on the position, humidity and pressure of the fingers touching its circuits’ contact-points. The body becomes part of the machines’ electrical flux, and is directly responsible for the generation of sound.  Such characteristics turn them into amusing sonic puzzles open to sensorial exploration. By the end of the workshop, apart from taking home an instrument of their own design, guaranteed to put and end to the neighbours’ peace, participants will become familiar with basic knowledge of electronics and circuit building. Participants are asked to bring non-metallic objects, such as boxes, buckets, tupperwares, etc, to house their tactile noise machines.

Workshop Statement

The workshop will provide participants an overview of mapping technologies and give them the opportunity to use these technologies to explore, analyze and represent urban spaces. Using locative media, we will capture and collect spatial, visual and audio data on multiple aspects of multiculturalism such as how different cultures stratify at a specific location and contribute to the mosaic of urban architecture and lifestyle. Areas of focus will include the environs of Tophane, Cihangir and Galata.  We are interested in exploring how new technologies might help to create a more context-aware experience of multicultural urban space and culture. The data collected in this workshop will be visualized to explore how technology enables the collection of different data and new forms of representation.  The primary objective of the workshop is to see how new media and location-based technology can enhance our capacity to represent and understand multiculturalism in Istanbul’s urban spaces. However, we are also interested in using the workshop to collect information  on how to develop and refine innovative tools and their concomitant  protocols, so that they might be used for surveying and visualizing any urban area.

This workshop will feature a presentation of “The Taxi Takes on the World” followed by a hands-on workshop of citizen journalism. The participants will be divided into groups of journalists and shooters. These groups will be expected to hit the streets of Albuquerque together to film their conversations with a driver inside taxis. This footage will be screened at the second session on September 24th. The second workshop will also provide training for another group of participants to pair up for training to shoot. All of the footage collected during and after these workshops will be used in the global online project.

Description: Since 2009, the Ethnographic Terminalia Curatorial Collective has staged annual exhibitions in major North American cities (Washington D.C., Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, New Orleans, Philadelphia) that explore the intersections of art and anthropology. Archives, ephemera, and Indigenous articulations of new media, identity, culture, language, and resistance have emerged as central themes in contemporary art-ethnographic practice and as a central interest to the curatorial work of the collective. New technologies, both materially and conceptually, present opportunities to push theoretical, disciplinary, and aesthetic boundaries. However, the implications of digitization and circulation of archival information present particularly interesting challenges for artists and scholars who seek to both represent and exploit the potential of digital archives. Building on the collective’s recent exhibitions, and in conjunction with an exhibition of new media artist Geronimo Inutiq’s Arctic Noise project, co-curated for ISEA 2015 at the grunt gallery in Vancouver (Terminal City), Ethnographic Terminalia invites workshop participants to demonstrate and discuss electronic art works and theoretical frameworks that disrupt material, figurative, discursive, cultural, and political manifestations of the archive, broadly conceived. Duration: Whole Day

This is a test for connection to the group pod.

Workshop Statement

In 1996, Adobe collaborated with Microsoft on developing a format for scalable computer fonts. This new format, named OpenType, was intended to expand the use of typographic behaviors as well as to provide a platform where all the world’s writing systems could be managed in a single font file. It is a cross-platform format which is recognized both in MAC OSX and Windows operating systems. OpenType fonts allow around a hundred specifications for typographic behavior. This provides the typesetter with the choice to apply various glyph substitutions in order to enrich the content like, small caps, ligatures, text figures, scientific numerals, and alternative glyphs, which are just five specification features out of the many available variables. These OpenType features are programmed in Fontlab where much of the type-design work takes place. The workshop intends to use Fontlab’s OpenType panel as a creative medium to generate typefaces that modify the intended use of common typographic behaviors. It aims to experiment with the possibilities that are provided by the OpenType format to create the unexpected rather than the established conventions of typesetting. In other words, to interfere with the conventions that serve for linguistic flow. As the name suggests, Text Invader aims to generate fonts that can attack and infect the ‘content’ in search for a pattern that may alter the context ironically or metaphorically. We will implant the Text-Invader ‘virus’ as various visuals: graphic images, letters, and abstract forms, which will be generated as an OpenType font format. Virus images will not be used arbitrarily to alter the look of the content. It will rather substitute the images with certain repetitive letters, words and even lines of text in search for creating a meta-text: Text in which the author’s intentions have been intermediated by the typesetter. This will further open a discourse and discussion about the author’s and designer’s roles in typesetting.

What does it mean to be a creative practitioner in the age of algorithms and surface-less media?
New media plays a crucial role in relation to the fragmentation of information so that they provide us with only some versions of the world. For instance, the way information is formatted and styled has an effect on how information is received and interpreted.

We believe in this age it is necessary to re-evaluate the capabilities of human imagination, and that this can by done by exploring the relationship between executing control and being controlled by a machine.
However, creative practitioners are sense makers imagining the possible rather than being satisfied with the probable. Often they distil intentions which are not perceivable to others.

In this workshop participants are invited to use a text-editor as a tool to create visual textures from typographic symbols. We will start with an initial input to then produce possible outcomes, to then collaboratively will explore its aesthetical, historical, and social values to re-work them from alternative perspectives, and produce a final outcome.

As a theoretical framework, our focus will be on creative methodologies that attempt to sabotage the functioning of tools and media or, on the contrary, collaborate with it. Here artists and designers capture, or rather provoke, improbable and unexpected results, exploring how to expand the field of the possible in contrast to that of the probable, putting in value the remains and the margin of error of the devices, as opposed to the regular and anticipated operation of those.

We will look at the thinking of the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, and other philosophers who have focused their research on questioning the role that tools and media play in the configuration of our perception and experience of the world.

The workshop will take place at EINA Bosc, a new space form EINA University School of Design and Art of Barcelona that allows the centre’s educational programme to be expanded from a perspective of permanent innovation and creative dynamics. EINA Bosc houses workshops and versatile creative spaces open to non-disciplinary experimentation, digital and traditional graphic arts, sets for audiovisual practices and spaces to carry out exhibition and performance programmes, and has all the spatial, human and logistical support necessary to develop the school’s offer at all levels of training.

Workshop statement (‘Seminar’)

The Concrete Poets of the ’60s, and their Dada and Futurist forebears, treated the visual appearance of text as a principal participant in the production of meaning. Their interests in such experimentation grew out of a deeply held belief that traditional forms of written communication, with its clean spacing, rectilinear layout, and sober letterforms, no longer could speak to the cultural schizophrenia of the modern age.

As concrete poets practicing at the beginning of a new century, Arts Alliance Laboratory has embarked upon the ActiveText Project. The ActiveText Project is an on-going experiment in radical ways of treating and interacting with the visual appearance of text in ways which reflect our post-millennial data devotion. Users can set glyphs, words, or entire passages in motion, pull them apart, blow them up, infect them with dynamic behaviors and even reconstitute them, in an attempt to deconstruct standard notions of text presentation and reception. Arts Alliance Laboratory use these behaviors to write digital poetry, create whimsical web pages and do performance art in dance clubs.

Workshop Statement

Writing, calligraphy, mark-making: these may seem like out-dated concepts. But nothing could be further from the truth. The world is growing together. The cultures of China and Islam are part of the global artistic debate. And these cultures are fundamentally calligraphic in their views of art and design. It is therefore urgent that users of the Latin alphabet increase their understanding of writing as a living process. Calligraphy is a deeply rooted source of meaning and communication. Letterforms are not static shapes living a changeless cyber-life. Text is a living, changing organism. Writing by hand is the fastest and most flexible way of designing text. Contemporary artists often make use of text. From Duchamp and Dada to the Conceptualists, from Cy Twombly, Bruce Nauman and Jessica Diamond to Jenny Holzer and Shirin Nishat, text has become a standard feature of modern art. Why is it there in paintings and installations? What forms does it take? What letterforms are used by artists? These are questions of great urgency, as they determine the look and meaning of visual language for designers and typographers. In this workshop we will explore a number of ways to create new letterforms by making variations on traditional scripts. Some experience of Italic calligraphy would be useful, but the workshop will be designed for all levels. Time will be short, so this workshop can only give a basic introduction to the principles of designing letters by hand. We will first use a traditional broad-edged pen to write a text in Italic script. But this traditional script will then be subjected to a series of changes intended to produce stronger graphic and expressive effects. Students will be given experimental writing instruments and asked to produce writing with a personal feeling. The principles of variation will be explained, such as varying the weight, height and density of the writing, but also the quality of the line, the level of legibility and the use of text to fill specific spaces. If time permits, we will also make experiments combining Arabic and Latin scripts. The two traditions may seem very far apart, but both are phonetic systems with a limited number of signs, and both use a traditional broad-edged pen. A cross-pollination of the two traditions could lead to new insights. The teacher will demonstrate the use (and abuse) of traditional and unconventional writing tools to produce new qualities of line. The demonstrations will take the form of debates between the students and teacher: students will be asked to challenge the teacher to make spontaneous marks and letterforms. This should make clear that there are no limits to experimentation. It is also designed to bring questions of function, legibility and meaning to the foreground. The teacher has worked for many years with film director Peter Greenaway. In Greenaway’s films, operas and installations, Neuenschwander’s calligraphy has played a prominent role. In this workshop we will look at how calligraphy has moved from paper to screen, from hand to mouse, and from the intimate scale of the drawing board to the vast scale of buildings and public spaces. We will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various Greenaway projects and investigate how new technologies can be integrated with traditional hand techniques.

The Center for Art and Exhibit Design Electronics (CAEED) was created to support people who are using or considering the use of electronics in exhibits and art-installations. This workshop will provide a hands-on look at fundamentals for manipulating and using electronic sensors with microcontrollers typically used for exhibits and art installations. Participants will work with an Arduino microcontroller and a remote sensor “shield” for building projects. Each participant will take home the microcontroller and electronics sensor board. Strategies to make a re-usable and scalable program will be explored. We will consider both electronics and programming techniques.

The Free Store Project explores the viability of creating sustainable long-term food redistribution networks. Moving well beyond traditional models of corporate responsibility and charitable ‘gift giving’. The Free Store project investigates how ‘unlikely’ relationships between the commercial and creative/social sector can produce projects that create sustained and productive innovation that benefits all parties. The Free Store workshop for ISEA2012 will reflect on the New Zealand Free Store projects, throwing some radical economics into the mix the workshop will investigate grass roots ways communities can address the growing disparity between the commercial imperatives that drive food waste and the dilemma of food security.

The Game of Dobble Debate: Play, Difference, and Coexistence is a research-creation project that investigates learning through design iteration, humor and play in the form of a card game, in order to encourage discussions about difference. Differing abilities are traditionally designated as disabilities but they could also be extraordinary ability, such as synesthesia. In the last decade, the role of game as a catalyst became foregrounded in various fields particularly in education and healthcare. This workshop aims to elucidate the difference and difficulties that is elicited through using play and humor rather than traditional play strategies. The Dobble Debate concept and practice was developed at OCAD University in Toronto. In addition to practice tests and successful introductory local workshops it was also presented at Transitio_MX06, Mexico City, the 17th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association 2016, Bologna Italy, and Multimedia, Cognition, – Art Therapy 2016 in Guanajuato, Mexico. Our aim is to improve the literacy of our workshop participants through this active participation creating a broader awareness. This will eventually contribute to grassroots participation in policy making. The goal is to create a deeper and more informed understanding and concern for different abilities – hopefully effecting positive societal change.

Each and every one of us is seeking something they cannot find. But is algorithmic online searching really the best way to do it?

This workshop is aimed at participants looking for a middle-ground approach towards online-life. We offer a toolkit to those who wish to neither disconnect nor let habit-forming technologies run their lives. We believe we can “deprogram” these technologies in a way that empowers us we will kick things off with a discussion on the ways in which habit-forming search technology shapes our daily pursuits. We will then split into pairs for two main exercise rounds—one per day. Their goal: becoming a human search engine.

ROUND#1“mapping things out”: using a new and disruptive, rank-free search engine called Shmoogle, pairs will turn their most personal online exploration into a free-associative game.

ROUND#2 “cruising via proxy”: pairs from round#1 will go on an online date, using Shmoogle as their guide. Together, they will explore each other’s neighbourhoods in hope to rediscover them through a fresh pair of eyes and a little bit of unhinged free-association.

We will wrap things up with a feedback round: “make the internet human again?” pros and cons.

Workshop Statement

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”
– Meno, from Plato’s dialogue (in Solnit, 2005)
We invite dedicated participants to join us at OWL circle pop-up workshops in cafes and other community places around Istanbul. Each circle is a structured gathering in which participants examine, through the making process, a relationship their body has to desire. Where do desires live in our bodies? How might our desires be supported by yet to be imagined technologies? How might such technologies be conceived of and developed – sufficiently that they may be evaluated – if we do not yet know what they are? OWL circles are 2 hours long, during which time you are supported to create a personal exploratory device. The device is not designed in any traditional sense, rather it emerges from an open making process that combines art and design ideation techniques with scientific curiosity and retrospective ethnographic evaluation. You will create, present and document your outcomes during the circle. We bring tools and materials for making. We ask you to bring your imagination and desires. The OWL circle is part of a larger project that is predicated on Arthur C. Clarke’s third rule of technology prediction, that “any sufficiently advance technology is indistinguishable from magic”. It began with a series of exploratory body-props that were used to examine emergent body-technology desires in participants from a range of socio-cultural backgrounds. From this work the OWL circle naturally emerged.

An example of an approach to scholarship that centers embodied community based practices, Local Autonomy Networks, or Autonets, seeks to develop networks of communication to prevent violence against queer and trans people, women and people of color. These networks will include mesh networked wearable electronics, low-fi alternative mechanisms and face to face agreements between people, inspired by community based, prison abolitionist responses to violence. As part of Autonets, I have facilitated three collective design workshops. These workshops build on “particle group”’s Science of the Oppressed, Gloria Anzaldúa’s conciencia de la mestiza, Michel Foucault’s subjugated knowledge and Lisa Duggan’s Femme Science.

The Soundwalk as an Art Form: Building Bridges to Peace presents an overview of the history of the participatory walk as an art form, including the soundwalk and its key concepts and development, while providing a theoretical tool box for creating ones own soundwalk as a transformative art experience. When leading a soundwalk we are combining the perceiver and the perceived, the participant and observer in an improvisatory way in the physical environment. Soundwalks guide us on a path primarily created by our ears. Sound artist, Andrea Williams, will lead a 45-minute soundwalk at Recinto del Pensamiento, located in Kilometro 11 Vía al Magdalena, an open space consisting of flower gardens, urban structures, and a small square for events. The park has been created to “eliminate segregation and contributing to healthy living”. The soundwalk will focus on: How can we be in peace and harmony with our surroundings? What does peace sound like? How do we feel connected non-verbally to other beings? How can observing other species bring us a sense of peace that we can translate to being at peace with fellow human beings? Following the walk, there will be 45 minutes of break-out groups for discussion posted on the URL.

Tutorial Statement

The Soundwalk as an Art Form presents an overview of the history of the participatory walk as an art form, including the soundwalk and its key concepts and development at Simon Fraser University, while providing a theoretical tool box for creating ones own soundwalk as a transformative art experience. When leading a soundwalk we are combining the perceiver and the perceived, the participant and observer in an improvisatory way in the physical environment. Soundwalks may disrupt a once familiar sense of place, and instead guide us on a path created by our ears rather than by the imposed visual cues of the urban environment. Sound artist, Andrea Williams, will lead a brief half-hour soundwalk around the still controversial Woodward Building to provide one of many examples of how one might begin to work within a community to create one’s own soundwalk. Following the walk, there will be an hour of break-out groups for discussion. Duration: Half Day.

A city operates on different scales: bikes, people, houses on street level; traffic and communities on neighbourhood level; infrastructure on the city level.

This workshop playfully investigates transformations and frictions that occur when instruments that help to make sense of higher scale phenomena are introduced. When the focus shifts from lives of individuals to pedestrian flows, qualitative methodologies give way to modelling. Agent-based computer models (ABM) are instruments of scale as they allow observing higher-level behaviour with large numbers of agents (scaling up in number) throughout a longer time span (scaling up in time). Creating computer agents inherently involves the omission of the original ecological, social or political entanglements of the modelled agent, as modelling sacrifices ‘resolution’ for ‘scale’.

The workshop hosts 15 participants and includes some small activities on the street. We will analyze a simple ABM that addresses community-based infrastructure maintenance. We will set up a simple distributed game in which some participants enact computer agents in urban space and will be connected via messaging app or mobile video stream with other participants in the Zoom call. During the game we will record the discrepancies and sympathies between the resolution of human experience and agent behaviour. The workshop closes with a discussion about scale critique, modelling, infrastructure, ableism, embodied knowledge and research through games.

Workshop Statement

HMSL is an object oriented programming language designed for experimental music. It is an extension to Fourth and is available on the Macintosh and the Amiga. HMSL is the result of ongoing research in algorithmic composition and interactive performance. It is being used to teach computer music techniques in many colleges and universities worldwide. As part of the workshop, several compositions will be performed and analysed in detail.

To get the teams started Usman asked the data artists to work within a conceptual framework centred on dilemmas, rather than focusing on a particular problem like the choice between reusable and deposable coffee cups. Usman asked artists to discover the broader dilemmas underlying the problems.
In the keynote that Julian Assange gave at this ISEA2013 Conference, he asked the uncomfortable question to artists: What are we actually doing as artists, are we doing anything that is important, that’s serious? Later on, he spoke about trying live through your principles and through your principles expose your work. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve at the Data Slam. To do meaningful work that has the potential to truly affect the ways people live, work and love in cities.
The idea of the data hackathon is a quite common around the world these days, so we wanted to do something a little different. Because often what happens is you get a bunch of people in a room and you give them a data set and they’re supposed to find some insight that the experts haven’t been able to see yet. The problem with that is this kind of format is that you put so much emphasis on simply presenting and beautifying the data and so little emphasis on what were the problems that were posed when the data was captured.
How was it captured? Why was it captured? What was not captured, what was excluded? You end up with a 24 hour solution that is nice and cute but not fundamental to anything lasting. In fact I don’t know of any hackathon that has contributed anything meaningful to how a city actually works. So we very intentionally wanted to do something different here. Which was to think more carefully about the complexity of the urban context. How we can act upon it in order to do something concrete about it?

Theta Lab will host a special 4-hour workshop for ISEA2013 delegates. Methods and strategies used in the project will be discussed, together with an opportunity for participants to get some hands-on experience with the tools and mapping processes at the heart of the work. Theta Lab is an experimental art research project combining neurofeedback with participatory art, electronic music and ‘slow design’ to explore and document qualities of attention and subjectivity facilitated by Alpha/Theta brainwave biofeedback. Electronic soundscapes modulated by changes in Theta and Alpha brainwave amplitude will assist participants to voluntarily shift their mental activity to a state of deep, hypnogogic stillness, a state of consciousness between wakefulness and dreaming. The aim of the project is to explore new contexts for aesthetic interactions, and to document the range of experiences afforded by this unusual form of human-computer interaction.

This work creates a visual-mental-physical circuit between a generative adversarial network (GAN), a co-robotic arm, and a five-year-old child. From training images to the latent space of a GAN, to a live human interpreter, it establishes multiple translational stages between human and non-human actors playing out through the medium of drawing.

The title refers to Dennis Oppenheim’s 1971 performance ‘Two Stage Transfer Drawing’, a direct inspiration for this work. In that piece, Oppenheim staged a photographic performance with his son, reconceiving drawing as a form of intimate, embodied, inter-generational touch-based communication. I have added additional stages to the exchange: from the host of absent children contributing training images to the blackbox neural network (GAN); through the robotic arm drawing with the child; to my son’s eyes where they are seen, named, and rendered through his own hand and imagination.

The neural network at the center of this artwork is a StyleGAN2 architecture trained on a collection of over 7,000 children’s drawings gathered by Rhoda Kellogg. As visual subject matter, these “early graphic expressions” recall Claude Debuffet’s Art Brut (1948) or raw art. I am interested in children’s art not just for being outside of convention and learned expression, but for how it shows drawing and graphical expression in its moments of development. Perhaps a better reference for this endeavor are the Surrealists, who also sought to escape the personal bounds of language and subjectivity through sleep deprivation, mind-altering substances, and games of chance and collaboration.

These questions of where we seek the other; where we grant agency, autonomy and intelligence; and why we might wish to escape our own subjectivities speak to the design and use of emergent AI. Experimental interactions between humans and non-humans have the potential to produce mutual revelation, this project is one model for that.

Workshop Statement

In this workshop the main emphasis is placed on the role of dynamic parameter change (instrument behaviour) in the synthesis of “timbre”, that is, the great importance of the control (MIDI) interface in electronic instruments.

A behind-the-scene look at the virtual sensing technologies developed by the Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) of Arizona State University and used in the interactive media dance performance Time in the Eye of the Needle presented by Montanaro Dance.

Workshop Statement (‘Seminar’)

This seminar will present musical applications demonstrating various types of interaction between a musician’s gestures and computer-generated sounds. The following tools will be presented: Max/MSP (Ircam/Opcode/Cycling74), a graphic programming environment used for the interactive creation and manipulation of Midi and audio data; and AtoMICPro (Ircam), the voltage-to-Midi converter which serves as the connecting link between gestural and the computer. Theoretical explanations of sound synthesis, Midi control and sensor technology will complement these practical demonstrations.

Totem Teller is a digital game exploring folk tales categorised ATU 327: The Children and the Ogre, and ATU 450: Brother and Sister and their variants. It demonstrates a digital archaeological process using poetry, glitch aesthetics, processed art and gameplay including exploration, discovery, dialogue, removal of digital grime and experimental composition. The player will act as archaeologist in uncovering elements, contemplating their meaning, and then in understanding the meaning they’ve created, understand the role of inspiration, stories and more about themselves.

Workshop Statement

Fritzing is an open-source initiative to support designers and artists to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product. We have created the Fritzing software in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, creating a tool that allows the designer / artist / researcher / hobbyist to document their Arduino-based prototype and create a PCB (printed circuit board) layout for manufacturing. The complementing Fritzing website helps users to share and discuss drafts and experiences as well as to reduce manufacturing costs.

Fritzing is essentially an Electronic Design Automation software with a low entry barrier, suited for the needs of  designers and artists. lt uses the metaphor of the breadboard, so that it is easy to transfer a hardware sketch to the software. From there, it is possible to create a circuit foot print for turning the circuit into a PCB. The PCBs can be fabricated by the user or sent out to a manufacturer for production. Thus, the Fritzing process will leave the designer with a robust circuit, which they can use for permanent installation or even batch production of a project.

Fritzing challenges the conventional model of both electronics production and those who produce electronics by providing open source, intuitive electronic fabrication tools for non-engineers. We are eager to see what type of projects will result from our new tool and how the aesthetics of electronic design will change.

Workshop Statement

This ‘transmission+interference’ workshop is a 2-day event where participants will explore the transmission, interference and playful aspects of sound through various uses of light. Participants will build a device that transmits sound within light and explore the various ways to interfere with signal the generate new sound / rhythm. You will also get to explore previously built / hacked / appropriated devices with which to develop new sound and light instruments with the aim of a group performance involving all of the participants of the workshop. This can / may include the use of motors, mirrors, laser pointers, elastic bands etc…

The workshop will include soldering and the use of various bits of electronics (integrated circuits and Arduino) and is open to beginners and skilled users. In addition to these skills we will encourage discourse around the ideas of live performance, improvisation and experimental music.

Duration: Two Days

This ‘transmission+interference’ workshop is a full day event where participants will explore the transmission, interference and playful aspects of sound through various uses of light and objects. Participants will investigate devices that transmit sound within light and explore the various ways to interfere with signals that generate new sound. It is this point of ‘in-between’ that is essential to understand in order to develop new sounds and the focus of this workshop will be based on the fine material of dust – the dirt and noise of everyday spaces. Through methods of diffraction (light) and transduction (sound) the materiality of air, dust and object are investigated through resonance and vibration to reveal the creative potential held within. As currents of air shift and circulate, assemblages of dust are formed across territories and surfaces that shape both sound and light resulting in a performative output. The aim is to move away from areas of dust as annoyance and instead actively engage with it as sonic material. The work draws upon current theory around vital / vibrant materialism (Bennett, Barad, Coole) and object-oriented ontology (Harman, Morton, Bryant). Participants will also get to explore previously built / hacked / appropriated devices with which to develop new sound and light instruments with the aim of a group performance involving all of the participants of the workshop. This can / may include the use of motors, mirrors, laser pointers, elastic bands etc…

The workshop will include soldering and the use of various bits of electronics (integrated circuits and Arduino) and is open to beginners and skilled users. In addition to these skills we will encourage discourse around the ideas of live performance, improvisation and experimental music.

In the workshop local participants will be invited to record stories of their neighborhood onto audio-postcards.

The project “Turbidity Paintings” proposes a new visualization methodology to record images and collect data on water quality. The core of this is to develop a system of image collection using an image based system to go alongside with traditional water testing equipment. In this workshop, participants will learn about the various aspects that affect water quality and take their own measurements at the Umgeni River, which is one of the most contaminated rivers in the region and is the primary source of water for more than 3.5 million people. “Turbidity Paintings” explores and challenges the divide between the arts and the sciences and directly questions the role of the artist when dealing with science and scientific data. Art and science are not so vastly different in their approaches. The role of the artist and the art in this project is to create an experimental model by which to develop new ways to create a dialogue around, in our example, water quality.

Workshop Statement

We are currently at a transition between being completely overwhelmed by mass production of technological innovations and trying to understand the “concealed” value or our role in this process. Will explore the use of typographic elements and text through interdisciplinary screen based design practices. It is based on the user experience captured through a series of experimental workshops driven by key design principles: readability, usability, and interaction; and focusing on an in-depth analysis of the screen in relation to type, and its use not only for reading purposes, but also on our role through this interaction process: “the human screen relationship”. A tweeter approach that will allow the participants to explore new ways of reading and writing. Duration: Half Day.

Workshop Statement

This workshop aims to introduce the craftsmanship behind all the steps that are taken during the design and production of a font – from the initial hand drawn sketches to the digitization process; from the establishment of the metrics architecture to the generation of a useable font – ‘passing on’ and instilling design skill and technique. I want to win attendees’ hearts and minds, fire their imagination and intellect, with discipline and freedom working in tandem. I will try to inspire fresh students and first encounters with enthusiasm, erudition, and technical veracity, to extraordinary heights of competence in the space of a single seminar as workshop. Type is the element. In regards to education, I believe that knowledge is constructed by the learner through action; it is mediate, not immediate. Action initiated by the learner himself is the indispensable ingredient of the act of knowing, and art is with us to give structure to reality. Paul Standard in 1947 wrote: “Geometry can produce legible letter but art alone makes them beautiful. Art begins where geometry ends, and imparts to letters a character transcending mere measurement.”
Herman Zapf a few decades later said: “A lot of mathematics and technical knowledge are involved in our work today. I would not call us artists any more. I think ’alphabet designer’ is more accurate, and our comrade is no longer the punch cutter but the electronics engineer. If the technician learns that he doesn’t have to work with a crazy artist, and the designer learns a little about electronics, they will make an ideal team. It is still teamwork as it was in the good old days of metal type.”
 
One of the great promoters of communication, typography invites us to meditate on, not only the form of letters but also on the vicissitudes of the cultural memory of the people. The opening provided by the rapidly extending design of digital fonts is forcing us to pay attention to the sounds that characterize our individual languages. “And there is the fact that content is always embodied in its form, and so to make form is also to shape content”. Lettering is, in many ways, the opposite of type design. Whereas type design creates letters that must function under the broadest possible circumstances, lettering is created for the most narrow of applications. A type designer does not draw letters; a type designer designs words and words are structures that contain patterns of black and white shapes, form and counter-form. It is a game that deals with space and rhythm. Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability. The purpose of typography is the arrangement of design elements within a given structure to allow the reader to easily focus on the message, without slowing down the speed of reading.  The prerequisites for this workshop are two: the completion of a Graphic Design and/or Typography course, and a clear determination in lettering. The required materials are: sketching and tracing paper, drawing pen and pencils, a pencil sharpener, an eraser, a ruler; a laptop running Mac OSX or Windows OS – FontLab®, Adobe® Illustrator™ and Photoshop™; a digital camera and connecting cable; a mouse or a tablet. The expected outcomes are – to be able to:

1. Describe the process of letter-making and system-making where each glyph is used in harmony.
2. Explore and create type drawings.
3. Design a method to generate fonts able perform in various applications and contexts.

We may conclude that a mathematical approach to the design of alphabets does not eliminate the artists who make them.

Workshop Statement

In order to position ‘typography education’ within a curriculum of visual communication, it would be beneficial to start from a description of professional practice. Based on research in a city in the Netherlands, a description of the professional activities of graphic design was developed. This description shows that graphic designers make decisions about three fundamental visual areas. Firstly, graphic designers consider visual elements (text, images, schematic elements, and combinations) and their relations. Secondly, graphic designers consider the visual strategy and try to achieve the maximum effect to achieve specific aims. And thirdly, graphic designers consider the position of the commissioner in relation to the position of the observer/reader/user/beholder. The combination of these three activities, which can be described as ‘visual logic’, ‘visual rhetoric’ and ‘visual dialectics’ can be seen as a form of ‘visual argumentation’. All graphic designers – whatever their individual preferences or specialisms – seem to provide visual arguments for their commissioners. However, the development of these visual arguments is only part of the services that graphic designers provide. Based on the work of Donald Schön, another eight ‘reflections in action’ are essential for a professional practice. Apart from the specific knowledge and skills to consider visual configurations, it is essential to organise projects, critically consider the approach, guide a project all the way to its realization, and consider the effects on personal and company positions. All nine reflections directly influence each other, and any design decision will affect the other reflections. These nine reflections are considered fairly simultaneously in a non-specific order. The order probably – and this remains to be investigated – depends on project characteristics and the individual characteristics of a designer. Based on this description of professional graphic design practice, it is possible to look again at the position of typography within graphic design education. In the first place, it is possible to review the role of typography in each of the nine reflections. This reveals how deeply engrained typography is for the profession of graphic design. Secondly, it is possible to consider the role of typography as part of the development of a visual argument. This approach makes sure that typography is situated at the appropriate positions within a visual communication curriculum. This position must directly reflect professional practice as well as relate directly to visual theory and practice based research.

Workshop Statement (Seminar)

Play and listen on Internet, write a story with a famous children’s author, design a television set, experience a multi-user 3D game. ln TypoToons, everything is possible! This VPRO (Dutch public broadcaster) project for young people includes Internet, TV and a game element. The programme involves children who interactively make up a story and a TV show. The project is made up of three parts. Each part features animated TypoToons, the 26 letters of the alphabet, who play the leading role.

The three parts are :

1. TypoBox (lnternet game)
2. TypoTV (Animation on TV)
3. TypoTeam (Multi-user game)

Produced by VPRO-TV (NL) Youth Department / Frank Alsema. Idea and development in co-operation with IJSFONTEIN Interactive Media (NL). Programming/design letter animation: NOB Virtual Productions (NL). Game development, Androme (B).

Workshop Statement

“Untitled” (Mechanics of Place) draws from a database of video streams made specifically for this work, in multiple locations at different times, layering these moving images onto specific locations in the streets of Istanbul.  When the camera recognizes a predetermined location on the street, it plays the corresponding video that has been assigned to that co-ordinate, layering it architecturally into the site. This is a three day workshop, followed by a roundtable discussion. Participants in the workshop are welcome to join for 1 – 3 days. Each day we will review the parameters of the project and the specifications for shooting and editing video.  Workshop participants will go into Istanbul to shoot and edit video that we will upload to the Mechanics of Place database.  Each day we will we will test the project on-site and then assess the experience through a round-table discussion on 9/16.  The results will be coalesced into a paper and presented at the CAA 2012 Centennial conference, Los Angeles, in the session:  The Aesthetics of Mobile Network Culture in Placemaking. “Untitled” (Mechanics of Place) will be situated in the neighborhood of Tophane, a district of Istanbul that is in a state of cultural transition and is the location of Istanbul’s vibrant art scene. In the 1800’s the area was largely Greek and Armenian, filled with laborers who worked in the industrial facilities of the port.  It is now a mostly Muslim neighborhood, as the ethnic minorities were expelled when the Republic of Turkey was established in 1922.  The video poems in this project are intended to reflect the issues of cultural disjunction of Istanbul, its volatility and remix of religious and ethnic tensions. These small films draw upon the transitional urban context to fully achieve their meanings.  The final walking route will follow an algorithmically designed path that has multiple hot spots where the videos will be seamlessly laid into the landscape.
The title of the project references the conceptual puzzles of the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and engages the narrative strategy of superimposition. Further, it alludes to the mechanical science of the Byzantine Empire where a unity between the real and the ideal was understood as a space that combined concrete elements and abstract notions.  The great Byzantine mathematician Anthemius, one of the architects of the Hagia Sophia, considered doors and windows as structures through which the sun’s rays enter and become geometrically mirrored toward a single surface, materializing the relationship between structure and path of light. Following this connective geometry, “Untitled” (Mechanics of Place) transmits a different kind of light: video luminosity virtually layered onto the architectural surfaces of the streets of Istanbul, echoing the illumination on the interior walls of the grand church/mosque of Anthemius’s design.  In “Untitled” (Mechanics of Place), the small screen videos create a relationship between distant narrative and current moment, artist/collaborator and pedestrian participant. The remixed image becomes a mediated fragment nested into reality, positioning itself between public and private and creating a nexus between history, social circumstances, memory and ephemera. The cameraphone in this project serves as “burning mirror”, accessing these video streams stored in the data-sphere and redirecting them to the doors, windows and framed architectural elements of the current location. The participants in the project are made up of local inhabitants and visitors to the areas where the project is authored and displayed.  The project facilitates new forms of collective participation and unpredictable collaboration between itinerant viewers and their surroundings. The ephemeral events that take place in these walks generate opportunities for unexpected encounters with familiar places and reveal the potential for artistic engagement in a new participatory medium.

Urban Sensoria is an experimental method of experiencing and exploring the city. It is also a theoretical inquiry into cities, culture, memory, experience, and how it relates to traditional media and new technologies. A multimedia, sensorial exploration of the structured, repetitive, random, personal, cultural, space-and-scale of the city. The WORKSHOP schedule is COMPLETELY flexible (to allow attendance to ISEA events). Most important is the initial meeting, after which we will arrange other meetings to discuss our experiences. Participants from Singapore are encouraged as much as participants from abroad. The previous Urban Sensoria workshop was held in Barcelona as part of the Barcelona International Contemporary Arts Festival. A talk related to the workshop will be given at the ISEA symposium.

Audience: ISEA2014 Delegates, Level: Foundation

Participants are taken outside of the Dubai ZU campus, they research its specimens and reopen the collaborative networks involved in the park accessing the exchange of correspondence among botanists and naturalists, examine the origin of specimens, whether they are genetically modified or not, learn about contractors hired for the construction and maintenance of the park, and then “plant “an inscription of the technoscience network, whether in digital or analog media, or plant the species themselves.

Two worlds, two spaces or cross borders – these titles bring us to the same concept about shifting between environments. Many changes could happen like changes in visuals, sounds and time. In this shift we will see many visions that can change our thoughts visually and conceptually and through these elements we will build our Machinima projects.

The workshop “Villages of the world”, a technological aesthetic mediation of identities and territories, consists of the creation of a video installation based on the collective construction of contents based on identity, memory and heritage.

The video installation seeks to generate new ways for the habitants of the San José sector of the city of Manizales, Caldas, Colombia (known for their problems of territorial organization) to relate to each other and to their territory through technological mediation, collective construction and participatory approach to community social empowerment.

“Las Aldeas del Mundo” consists of three moments (diagnosing and reflecting, questioning and doing, concluding, proposing and visualizing) characterized by experiential dialogues about identity, memories and heritage in relation to the territory, generating the video installation as a product.

Tutorial Statement (‘Seminar’)

Digital artists and authors seek to create richly interactive worlds. Such environments evolve over time, challenge spatial conventions, and generate unexpected events and experiences.

With this in mind, Virtools 3D software gives authors a means of bringing their ideas to life with drag-and-drop building blocks and a graphical interface. Give media objects, characters and sounds individual behaviors: they become actors in their own right alongside the author and his or her audience. Events, whether triggered by users or the application itself, generate complex and intuitive interactions.

This seminar will show several projects created with Virtools authoring tools, to demonstrate how the software adapts to an author’s specific needs and goals. The range of works covers CD-Roms, online creations and an exhibit installation. The seminar will take you behind the scenes of one project to see step-by-step how Virtools technology transforms 3D models, images and sound into interactive and behavioral environments.

Participants will acquire the basic knowledge needed to create immersive experiences using affordable Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. We will explore the aesthetics of VR as well as the main problems designers and artists are facing when creating interactive content within this new medium.
We will present a post-mortem technical analysis of the performance AWKWARD CONSEQUENCE, and give tutorials on some of the technologies involved: Cardboard-based VR, Unity, and OpenFrameworks.

Workshop Statement

Violinist/composer Mari Kimura will give a lecture/demonstration using Zeta MIDI violin and interactive computer system. She will demonstrate the integration between live performer and technology, and discuss the issues and perspectives for the future.

This workshop proposes an experiment of minor archaeology with the participants’ personal media devices, in an attempt to discover what kind of visual residuum they might retain. The activity works as a crossover between group therapy session and cinematographic self-performance, in which the public will plug their mobile phones directly to a big screen and navigate their unfiltered content under the gaze of one another. By doing so, we mean to explore the imagery resulting from everyday practices such audiovisual annotation and instant messaging.

The production of audiovisual media by personal devices has taken an undeniable political and aesthetic magnitude. On the one hand, it became instrumental for the demos that have been sweeping across the world since the beginning of the decade, by allowing for dissident coverage that challenges hegemonic discourse. On the other, it has given rise to manifold photographic practices that take to an extreme the idea of a cámera-stylo. Images are now often used as a means to take and send notes, hyperdocument everyday life, and produce ephemeral self-representations.

It is tempting to acknowledge these phenomena as a renewal of traditional genres, such as photojournalism and self-portraiture. However, to consider them as mere “versions 2.0” of what was already being done might overshadow the fact that these images exist in a very particular condition within the dynamics of network communication. They are not made as visual totalities to be contemplated or interpreted autonomously.

Rather, they are a collateral effect of our increasingly mediated social interactions: mothers wishing a good day; friends showing where they are; a love interest suggesting a date.

In this context, pictures seem no longer to be performed as objects of memory but rather as fleeting speech acts, utterances delivered by instant messaging applications such as Whatsapp and Snapchat. Most of them are made to be forgotten, and indeed they are. Nonetheless, many remain carelessly stored on our mobile phones. Long after they have lost all original meaning, they might still be there, taking space among our family pictures: the noise of bare life piling over the decisive moments we have chosen to collect from it. These residual images are rarely made public; when they come to surface, it’s often due to an accident, the medial analogue of a Freudian slip.

This workshop means to dive into this collective unconscious of contemporary visual culture. The organizer will work alongside the public in order to bring forth the construction of History and identity that takes place within their mobile archives, beyond the scrutiny of social media platforms. By the means of dialogue, we will try and make sense of these fortuitous collections, sharing what was not meant to be shared in the first play. On the way, we hope to spot the neglected aesthetics of photography as a means of sharing experiences.

Details on how the participants should prepare and what to bring

The participants should bring their smartphones / mobile media devices and come prepared to explore these devices’ audiovisual content. If they have any special AV adapters for their phones, it would be helpful if they could bring these as well.

Participant background/profession/prior knowledge/age

The workshop is meant for the general public. The target audience can be anyone who uses mobile instant messengers and/or is interested in multimedia social networking. Particularly, the activity will interest media students, academics, and professionals.

Participants discuss and experience ideas of technology and non-technology; voice and objects; black boxes and out-ofthe-boxes. David Moss, considered one of the most innovative singers and performers in contemporary music, says, “Consider this: a spoon is technology; your vocal chords are technology; a song is technology…technology is transfer of power.” Presented by The Outpost Performance Space. Workshop open to youth and adults.

Workshop Statement

Spatialized location is not new – it is a fundamental aspect of human wayfinding cognition. From ancient and early historical practices such as song lines, Polynesian maritime navigation and religious pilgrimage routes that link one shrine to the next holy site, networks of nodes and scattered cues assisting navigation seem to be beyond culture. Researchers in the field of human cognition would generally agree: although it is a coarse statement in light of the finer granularity of knowledge of human spatial cognition, our species is fundamentally a navigator of networks of spatial nodes, or cognitive maps. Maybe for the first time in the history of knowledge, in the beginning of the hypertext era (what we can also call the Internet) the idea of having multiple points of information that could share many parts of the same text, image or video provided, came into use as tools to organize all human content in terms of information. The hypertext is a means of questioning the idea of the total point of view, i.e. it is impossible to find or know the complete version of some fact, artifact, or experience. In this sense, when we transport this idea to the world through geospatial hypertext, we invite others to share a highly subjective point of view with us, through open means of sharing knowledge about our geographical location or place of residence to invent a new subjective relation between the space and the information. The Walkingtools and the HiperGps Projects (2009, Silva and Stalbaum) are aimed at providing desktop production tools that enable creative people to produce mediated routes for others to play back or follow using their own mobile phones. It allows creators to produce searchable and easily sharable walks. In the history of locative media, early innovators such as Teri Rueb (1999) invented their own systems that enabled them to create mediated walking experiences. Geo-annotative projects such as Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments (2007) by Carmin Karasic, Rolf van Gelder and Rob Coshow furthermore allowed users to add their own thoughts and interpretations to an artist-designed, hot spot triggered, mediated geospace. Open source platforms for the production and sharing of such mediated walks have yet to emerge. HiperGps addresses the production tool of such hybrid, peripatetic media. In conceptual terms, this type of media is actually very simple. Imagine a device that can guide you through the world by pointing you in the right direction. In fact, these Global Positioning System devices are now rather ubiquitous and well understood for the purposes of automotive navigation. Now imagine that that media (audio, for example,) can be triggered at points along the way (waypoints). And then imagine that the prerogative to create this kind of triggered content was egalitarian in nature, that everyone with a computer and Internet connection can produce and share such content, and that others can find this content using only their internet connected mobile phones.

With our purified water, we will tend to the plants at our site and talk about a variety of ways to save on the water we use for gardening. We will then explore the use of water in art, through two projects based on water. In the first project, we will draw pictures with water on paper, and then make the images visible by adding ink to the water. In the second project, we will mix water with sand to make molds that depict machinery or technology. In this interplay between art, nature and machine, we will use a natural element (sand) to illustrate technology.

This tutorial will cover the ins and outs of internet radio, from setting up your own station, to understanding current copyright law and putting together the proper equipment for an effective webcast.

This tutorial will cover the ins and outs of internet radio, from setting up your own station, to understanding current copyright law and putting together the proper equipment for an effective webcast.

Workshop Statements

Judith Donath:    

A website is a virtual neighborhood. It is an information space that gathers people with common concerns and interests, or in the case of a project, a common task to accomplish. Certainly a website can be a repository of information, a fast efficient method for international publication. Yet a website can be much more: it can evolve as it is used and it can be a center of activity and communication. My focus in this workshop will be on the social aspects of designing websites as project tools. How do the participants get to know each other?

Victoria Vesna:      

We will examine and critique a number of existing web sites, working towards a deeper understanding of the impact of visual representation, anonymity, pseudonymity, ephemerality, etc. on the social norms that evolve within the site The web is a communal, collaborative public space – how do we contribute to this environment without uploading yet another static documentary of work? What kind of effect does existing software, and the speed with which we access resources, have on the interaction and aesthetic of web-based projects? What happens to work that attempts to bring the web into physical public spaces? In what ways do online works need to be modified when taken offline? How might the space work is experienced in influence audience interaction, and how may web projects reinforce local community relations? In this workshop, I will give a conceptual overview of available web technologies, and how they are being un/successfully used in both on and offline projects. I will address the aesthetics of navigation and interactivity in effort to illustrate how one prepares for using the web as the primary location of a project, as well as a secondary site to projects that exist outside of networks. We will view and critique works that reside solely on the web, as well as projects done with other media that have a web component as part of their concept. Our discussion will also focus on the changing relationship between artist/audience, and how this transformation effects both on and offline spaces. By placing our discussion in a larger historical framework of artists working outside the confines of institutions, we will discuss the implication of the web on public exhibition/interaction processes.

Nik Williams:      

The internet is a primordial soup of opportunity and change comprised of competing protocols, platforms, hacks and cracks. Beyond its physical structure, the internet speaks to our deeply rooted desire as a species to extend its capacity to communicate intimately across an ever widening venue. This an egalitarian, universal quest which is tempered increasingly by the local laws of supply and demand. No matter how you feel about the socio-political ramifications of so called “market driven” problem solving, the fact is that the structure of the internet is shaped by economic interests willing to spend whatever it takes to dominate and/or facilitate the nature of art and popular culture in the next millennium. Many “cybernauts” jumped on this helter-skelter bandwagon bright-eyed, open-hearted and flush with ideas waiting to be loosed on a receptive, like-minded world. Some have been buoyed by success, others are less enthusiastic. Will we generate the requirements for sustainable, intelligent life on the net or will the forces of greed and corporate entropy pull the evolution of what some have called the greatest democratic tool ever created into the black hole of mediocrity? Taking the state of the network as a given is not unlike the reaction of a patient who is diagnosed with a serious illness. It might be bad news but thank heaven one has insurance. I hope to encourage the examination of some root misconceptions regarding the capacity of the net to deliver dreams in tact and to discuss issues which will effect the quality of life our network communities might hope to achieve. Suffer not the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune 500 companies. Understand a little more about how tools are made, what art requires of all of us and put aside the notion that 18 hour days make you a better anything.

Remark: this ISEA96 Workshop  was organized in co-operation with The Netherlands Design Institute and held at the Institute in Amsterdam.

Workshop Statement

With the Weird/Wonderful Fair we want to direct our attention to openness, flow and co-creation. We invite the local residents of Istanbul to explore with us in a mixture of interactive workshop, intervention and collective art piece. The Fair attempts to transgress the conference’s boundaries and incorporate the city’s public space, transforming the streets of Istanbul into an open space classroom. Instead of the conventional teacher-student approach which still dominates our educational systems, we propose a mobile peer-teaching format, a more subversive structure where we can use simple DIY projects to facilitate insights. Armed with these educational project kits, we will share knowledge with anyone in exchange for their spare time. We will bring invisible ink, simple robots and other surprising objects to build and understand. We will move through the city ‘selling’ these experiences like street vendors. Once you have completed a session with us, you will be invited to help us continue teaching, in a process we hope will help us cross boundaries of language and preconceptions. By accentuating the social and fluctuating aspects of knowledge production and exchange, the Fair embodies an attitude of “learning by making” and “learning by playing”. Our aim is to facilitate a series of moments where meeting and making together allows us to explore the larger unknown. Each daily journey will have four planned stops: Taksim Myd (1), the harbor quay in front of Istanbul Modern (2), the sidewalk of the Puente Galata bridge (3), and the Spice Bazaar (4).

Wetware Hackers Discussed is a responsive/reflective discussion of Hands-On How-To Workshops on Biotech Art and Wet Lab Procedures. In addition to the issues of using biotech within an art practice, teaching biotech procedures presents additional issues that differ from teaching within an electronic/computational paradigm. The panel will generate, problemmatize, discuss and record observations of informal biotech instruction, specifically responding to the “Wetware Hackers” ISEA2006 workshop conducted by the panelists.

WIRELESS EXPERIENCE/MOBILE CONTENT WORKSHOPS

The-phone-book Limited commission creative minds across all media to create innovative content for mobile phones, and pro-actively give away three years of knowledge through a series of workshops.

Through inspirational content collections and our hands-on educational approach, we aim to encourage the broader community whether they consider themselves ‘artists’ or not – to make better use of their phone, and fill the otherwise empty wireless data space…before it is filled with adverts and sporting clips!

the-phone-book.com is a digital publishing project that commissions international new works of ultra-short fiction for quarterly distribution by wireless and traditional internet. the-phone-book. corn was conceived by creative director Ben Jones and production director Fee Plumley from the-phone-book Limited.

Workshop Statement

What happens when design research evolves into scientific enquiry, and ends up in potentially criminal territory? I am a material designer using magnetism as an ingredient. Recently, I have begun to use the magnetic field of credit card stripes in my research work. This followed a chance encounter with a magnetic engineer on a London tube line, and other twists of plot that sound stranger than fiction. The workshop tells the story of how magnetic materials transcend boundaries between technology and art. Workshop participants will be asked to take a leap of faith and employ their credit cards in a design technique. Using latex, cornstarch and iron powder, we will copy the body of the credit card and hack into the magnetic field stripe. The participants will learn the language of ANSI/ISO 16-character bit code. We will look at the magnetic field pattern and decode it to find the information concealed. What starts out as a craft process will result in a demonstration of scientific principles, and an exploration of how private information is securely protected.

Our session nestles into a gap between misreading and citation, between ways of knowing prompted by sound, sight and those facilitated by touch. The misreading? The word “gap” can also be “gape” thanks to their shared roots in the German word “gaffen,” which means to gape, to open the mouth wide, to yawn. And the citation? “When Our Lips Speak Together” is the title of philosopher Luce Irigaray’s seminal 1977 essay in which she both models a form of critical thought that speaks the body while also calling for a tactile poetics that moves beyond a binary logic of conflict.

We will attend, therefore, to the mouth, to word of mouth, to lips moving together and to the circles that spiral from in and out of the mouth.
Our workshop invites participants to feel their mouths and bodies, to gape and yawn, pucker, lick, laugh, gnash, breathe, and hum — moving from the lips inwards to teeth and tongues and deeper into the throat and lungs through a series of guided provocations. We ask who speaks, what speaks, who is allowed to speak, and what gets spoken. While “word of mouth” points to a generally maligned oral tradition, how might we reclaim it together, passing ideas along mouth to mouth?

Audience: Public, Level: Advanced

WebRTC is an open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple JavaScript. Participants will create an online real-time performance.

Audience: Students, Level: Foundation / Intermediate

This workshop explains the principle of Zoetrope Animation and invites participants to create their own Zoetrope Animations. Participants will design 2 motions to create their own Zoetrope Animation, both 2d and 3d. 2d motion will be drawn on a vinyl record-size drawing board with 16 sequences. The 3d motion will be paper-fold, play-clay or action figure toys. Both to be placed on-top of the record player to be viewed and recorded with a video camera using a high shutter speed.

This workshop traces the evolution of ‘Ars Combinatoria’ from the perspective of its cultural histories manifested in various visual arts, music, writing, and design combinatory systems.

Syllabaries and the alphabet are systems designed to synthesize written propositions, but the first text that can be considered as using combinatorial principles was the I-Ching with its binary-based language.

In the 13th century, Ramon Lull produced a series of concentric movable wheels considered to be the first textual sentential machines. Lull was read by Giordano Bruno, in the 16th century, and both were later read by Leibniz, inspiring his Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria.
The ancient pattern poetry, the literary methods of Mallarmé, the typographic works of Tristan Tzara, the puns and language games of Lewis Carrol, the portmanteau words of James Joyce, the potential literature of the French group Oulipo, or the cut-ups of William Burroughs, can trace a literary history of Ars Combinatoria. Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee have developed generative processes for their creative and teaching strategies. Klee’s pedagogical notebooks provide designed diagrams on visual combinatorial principles.

All those historical procedures have been re-conceived as elements of an evolutive process since the emergence of the computer as a semiotic machine, able to recombine signs through mathematical algorithms. This computational writing methodology proposes creative dialogues between the manifested linguistic structures and the possible modifications they can introduce through algorithms specially designed to work as machinic, digital, and/or net-based authors.

The interconnection between the meta-authored text and the resulting work could be analyzed through a form of genealogy. How does the original project resurface visually and/or conceptually in the final product? The meta-discourse may reappear as an index, but sometimes it is wholly precluded. Then, the outcome does not reveal its genetic diagram which could remain secret, lost, or inaccessible.