POSTSENSORIUM

Plenary Session: GREEN Revisited – Encountering Emerging NatureCultures

Adam BROWN / Kristin BERGAUST / María CASTELLANOS VICENTEE
WELCOME BY RASA SMITE / MODERATOR: JENS HAUSER

Adam BROWN. Shadows from the Walls of Death: Remediating Green.
Kristin BERGAUST. FELT – Living Technologies and Renewable Futures in Oslo
María CASTELLANOS VICENTE. The Plants Sense. A multispecies cyborg garden.

Adam BROWN. Shadows from the Walls of Death: Remediating Green.

Shadows from the Walls of Death: Remediating Green is a series of artworks that deconstructs the symbolic and superficial use of “green” as a pretense, synonymous with ecological and vegetal health, by recreating a highly toxic pigment called Paris Green and deadly wallpaper, thus ironically re-establishing humans’ material connection to the color green. By synthesizing this hyper-toxic green pigment, far from the images of the idealized pastoral nature, the performance draws its inspiration from the chemist Dr Robert Kedzie who, in 1874, wrote a book of the same title in an effort to raise public awareness about the dangers of arsenic-pigmented wallpaper. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries had given rise to modern cities removing humans from an entangled connection with nature. While a growing body of genetic, physiological and psychological evidence suggests that humans have evolved biologically and culturally to be attracted to greenness, this human drive to recreate greenness within urban settings led, however, to a series of paradoxes and contradictions: The very chemical processes artificially employed to bring greenness back into people’s lives paralleled the anthropogenic destruction of the environment. Mass produced toxic pigments were used – by artists, in printed wallpaper, and even as a colorant for candy – to replace the ‘nature’ that the Industrial Revolution was eroding. Painters armed with a relatively inexpensive palette of bright prismatic colors – such as Paris Green – emboldened artists to paint symbolic illusions of the natural world.
In the performance Shadows from the Walls of Death, Paris Green is synthesized in order to reproduce the deadly wallpaper. Finally, a Van Gogh referenced image is painted in Paris Green, only to be further bioremediated and detoxified by bacteria and fungi-based micro ecologies. Micro-ecologies capable of detoxifying arsenic exist due to the ecological principle summarized by Baas Becking hypothesis: ‘Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects.’ Here, these non-human micro ecologies not only help us out of this toxic environmental predicament but also deconstruct ontologies acknowledging only human individuality. As an indexical act this artistic action opens up fields of questioning beyond the symbolic, and emphasizes the importance of a material, epistemological and art politics, since the chemical synthesis of toxic pigments radically altered the course of art history itself. The concept of the Anthropocene demands a form of remediated, indeed bioremediated art that can operate on multiple scales, independent of human belief or desires.

Adam W. Brown is an Intermedia artist, scholar, and researcher. His work incorporates art and science hybrids including living and biological systems, robotics, molecular chemistry, and emerging technologies that take the form of installations, interactive objects, video, performance and photography. Brown is a Full Professor at Michigan State University where he created a new area of study called Electronic Art & Intermedia and directs the Bridge Artist in Residency Program. Brown has exhibited widely in international venues in North and South America as well as in Europe, and received awards including several honorary mentions at the Prix Ars Electronica. In 2020 Brown received the Grand Prize for [ir]reverent: Miracles on Demand, in the 23rd Japan Media Arts Festival.

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María CASTELLANOS VICENTE. The Plants Sense. A multispecies cyborg garden.

The Plants Sense, exhibited in the PostSensorium exhibition, is an alive installation, a cyborg garden that allows the audience to know and experience the secret language of plants.
In this multiespecies garden, plants and machines cohabit together in an ecosystem–also altered by the presence of humans–, that aims to figure out more about the language of plants.
The work consists of an interactive garden in which different sensors measure the electrical oscillations of the connected plants, and show their biochemical reactions to the human presence and the environment that surrounds them. All this information is processed and translated into vibrations, movements and sound that allow the visitor to perceive the plants through several interfaces.
In other words, all the connected plants works like a big brain that controls the machines that are installed in the garden. This is possible through use of an algorithm; a self-organizing map, SOM. That allow us to order and organize the data received from the plants in a server
This interaction makes possible the communication between humans and plants, thus reaching the understanding of the vegetal language thought the visualization of patterns along the time. So, the installation translates and transmits precisely those signals that humans, due to our limited perceptual system, cannot receive in other way.

María Castellanos is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of art, science, technology and society. She holds a Bachelor’s degree and a Doctorate in Contemporary Arts Practices from the University of Vigo (SP), with an Extraordinary Phd Award 2016. Currently she is postdoctoral researcher at OsloMet in the framework of FeLT Project –Futures of Living Technologies–
Her work was exhibited and performed at venues and festivals such as Ars Electronica Festival (AT), LABoral Art Centre (SP) , Athens Digital Arts Festival (GR), Onassis Stegi (GR), House of electronic Arts Basel(CH), La Gâite Lyrique Museum (FR), DRIVE Volskwagen (DE), Matatero Madrid (SP), Bozar Electronic Art Festival (BE), Arts Santa Mónica (SP), Touch me Festival (CH), CEBIT Festival (DE).

ART & AI KEYNOTE TALK

Christiane PAUL. Art and AI – Automating the Sensorium
MODERATOR: RASA SMITE

Christiane PAUL. Art and AI – Automating the Sensorium

Over the past years artificial intelligence has moved to the center of technology discussions due to the rapidly increasing role of ‘machine learning’ in data processing and decision making for the purposes of commerce, labor, surveillance, and entertainment, among other areas. Digital art has critically investigated the developments of AI and the social and cultural transformations generated by it, including the effects of the automation of our senses. The talk gives an overview of artworks that have explored vision as it is reflected in image recognition; speech and voice in relation to issues of sentience and personality; as well as the construction of knowledge. Exposing bias and contextual misunderstandings or drawing attention to underrepresented data sets, these artworks explore how AI learns to see and classifies images or tells stories. The talk also considers the automated sensorium’s aesthetics and potential for creative expression.

Christiane Paul is Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, as well as Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation’s 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and her books are A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, May 2016); Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 2003, 2008, 2015); Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts(Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012); and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 – 2018 (2018/19), Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011) and Profiling (2007), and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to Internet art. Other curatorial work includes The Question of Intelligence (Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2020). Little Sister (is watching you, too) (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NYC, 2015); and What Lies Beneath (Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, 2015).

POSTSENSORIUM Exhibition Opening

Guided tour by curator Raitis SMITS
Venue: the National Library of Latvia

The exhibition artists: Maria CASTELLANOS and Alberto VALVERDE (ES), Santa FRANCE (LV), David HAINES and Joyce HINTERDING (AU), Knowbotiq (CH/AT), Kristīne KRAUZE-SLUCKA (LV), Vanessa LORENZO (CH/ES), Špela PETRIČ (SI), Tivon RICE (US/NL), Clement VALLA (FR/US), Rihards VĪTOLS (LV) / The National Library of Latvia from 24.09.2021-12.11.2021 // Daniel HENGST (DE) / RIXC Gallery from 1.10.2021-12.11.2021.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 1A. (XR) EMBODIED EXPERIENCES AND EXTENDED REALITY

Eva SJUVE / Andrew BURRELL / Lily DÍAZ-KOMMONEN, Cvijeta MILJAK / Jonas KELLERMEYER, Jan TORPUS / Da Ye KIM
MODERATOR RASA SMITE Venue: the National Library of Latvia

Eva SJUVE. In Situ Suspension with Ontological Interfaces
Andrew BURRELL. “Every Act of Reading Performs the Work“ – Navigating Virtual Environments
via Physical and Narrative Portals.
Lily DÍAZ-KOMMONEN, Cvijeta MILJAK. Making and Sharing Stories – Immersive Experiments
in Sharing Knowledge for Cultural Heritage
Jonas KELLERMEYER, Jan TORPUS. Iterative Sensing & Sense-Making in Extended Realities – “ubiCombs”
as a spatial means of investigating the condition of contemporary techno-social hybridity
Da Ye KIM. Embodied Experience of the Ultimate Border: DMZ in Virtual Reality

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Eva SJUVE. In Situ Suspension with Ontological Interfaces

This presentation discusses the investigation of situated kinesthetic disassociation and sensory
glitches as alternative methods to shift our perception, and alter our frame of reference of external reality. This artistic exploration with ontological interfaces to mediate data is offering an alternative to how sensation and reflection are produced. The question is how to activate operational vectors between the proximal stimulus and the distal periphane, in man, machine, and environment. Sylvie Wynter writes on the importance of acts to resist and destabilize, in order to allow for renewed perspectives. Embodied and situated movements, of temporal suspension, and auditory patterns support intervention in the perceptual system, a way to break the habitual as a necessary activity, according to Henri Bergson. Katherine Hayles in her writing discusses our extended embodied awareness, in situ and material ways, aided by electronic prosthesis, to renew our existing models of reflection.

Eva Sjuve is a Swedish media artist and designer. She is working with revealing underlying invisible structures in our environment and society. Her recent work Fungi Orchestra (2021) models of communication between man-machine and more-than-human is explored. The work Metopia (2014-2021) investigated our relation to air pollution, complex data, and sonification. She received several awards, including the New York Exposition of short film and video in 1996 and CYNETart in 2001. In addition, she was commissioned from New Composers Series in New York to develop new technology for her sound performance at the Performa 07 Biennale. Eva’s curatorial work includes ORB, the first WiFi outdoor exhibition in Copenhagen in 2003, a distributed art exhibition including The Chemical Art Ensemble, Trebor Scholz, and Turbo Twins, followed by the show Struktur in NYC, including Ilze Black, Wim Salke, and Jim Costanzo.
Her work has been exhibited at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki; Istanbul Biennale; CAEIT Experiments in Art, Information and Technology at CalArts; The Museum of Contemporary Arts in Chicago; City Exhibition Hall in Sydney, and at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba amongst others. In addition, she presented artistic research at the International Symposium for Electronic Arts, 08/14/15/16/19, Creativity & Cognition 09, Open Fields Conferences in Riga 16/17/19/20, the International Computer Music Conference 16/18, Hybrid City 2013 in Athens, and MediaCity 2010 at Bauhaus University. In 2017 she was a Keynote speaker at Arts in the environment in Helsinki.
http://moolab.net
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Andrew BURRELL. “Every Act of Reading Performs the Work“ – Navigating Virtual Environments via Physical and Narrative Portals.

“Every Act of Reading Performs the Work” (EARPAW) is a collaboration between contemporary artist Agatha Goth-Snape and new-media artist and design researcher Andrew Burrell. It is a project that sits across multiple realities, and where the artists’ presence shifts between the physical and the virtual as a form of medium or guide to an extensive virtual world. The audience is only ever allowed glimpses of this world through several portals in both the gallery and in performance events. One such portal is a 2 meter-tall LED screen in the proportions of a doorway through which a viewer may view, but never truly enter, the world. The audience is constantly in a process of being both invited into and distanced from, this world.
The world of EARPAW was created in a VR headset, scrawled in what is reminiscent of a relational mind-map, featuring nodes of interconnected texts and virtual doorways, yet the viewer is never invited to experience it through the headset. They are instead guided by a computational agent, “The Daemon”, as it traverses a path through the world, or through the performative interventions of Gothe-Snape as an “Apparitional Surge” via her presence in the world as a real-time ghostly avatar. Finally, an audience has the world revealed to them as a “Rogue Monologue” performed live on stage with the virtual world unfolding in a projection behind Gothe-Snape as she narrates a passage through it.
This paper explores the world building potential of Virtual Environments using EARPAW as a case study and invites a consideration of alternatives to the headset in exploring the potential for complex audience experiences of Virtual Environments as narrative spaces.

Andrew Burrell is a practice-based researcher and educator exploring virtual and digitally mediated environments as a site for the construction, experience and exploration of memory as narrative. His process is one of worlding in virtual space—visualising otherwise unseen connections and entanglements. His ongoing research investigates the relationship between imagined and remembered narrative and how the multi-layered biological and technological encoding of human subjectivity may be portrayed within, and inform the design of, virtual environments. He is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication, faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney. He lives and works on Gadigal Country.

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Lily DÍAZ-KOMMONEN, Cvijeta MILJAK. Making and Sharing Stories – Immersive Experiments in Sharing Knowledge for Cultural Heritage

Recently, during ongoing global pandemic restrictions, we have found virtuality imposed upon many of our everyday activities, experiences and interactions. Remote, mediated collaboration presented itself as nearly only way of working within the international Creative Europe research project ‘Beyond Matter – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality’ which gathers diverse actors committed to arts, culture and heritage. At Aalto University, our work centres on further developing a research framework using co-creative embodied practices and artistic and humanities-oriented methodologies. We seek to learn more about deeper meanings that often come about as a result of culture and heritage experiences. How, when and why do exhibitions touch their visitors in meaningful ways?
In this paper we discuss the design process leading to the first pilot in a series of experimental participatory PORE workshops (Performance-Oriented Research Methods for Audience Studies and Exhibition Evaluation). The workshop was created as an online experience for the open-source Mozilla Hubs platform, where participants interacted as avatars. Parting ways with fascination for (hyper)realism we are relying on sensibilities of artistic praxis to experiment with aesthetics of the medium while posing ethical questions about what sustainability could mean in the context of interdisciplinary collaboration, participatory engagement and communication.

Lily Díaz-Kommonen is full professor of new media at Aalto University. She began her research career with a Fulbright fellowship for independent work at theArchive of the Indies in Seville on the topic of visualization in 16th century science (1990-1991). She completed her doctorate in 2001 on the topic of Art, Fact, and Artefact production. Design Research and Multi-disciplinary Collaboration. Member of the Jury in II Bienal Iberoamericana de Diseño/BID 2010 and Co-curator of Designing Knowledge, ACM SIGGRAPH 2018. She is director and producer of award-winning art and design installations that combine artistic, humanistic and scientific knowledge. Among her latest publications are, Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture (Routledge, 2016) and Adaptation and Convergence of Media (AaltoARTS Books, 2018) See: www.sysrep.aalto.fi

Cvijeta Miljak is a designer and artist. She works as a researcher at Systems of Representation at Media Lab of Aalto University. She is currently involved in ongoing practice-based doctoral research, as part of a Creative Europe interdisciplinary project Beyond Matter – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality, which focuses on developing novel solutions for creative participatory practices and community involvement with culture and heritage. Miljak’s educational background is in the visual culture domains of graphic design, photography, new media and moving image, and going further back, in linguistics and literature. She has been practising for more than two decades mainly in cultural and educational, but also in corporate environments. Her works have been shown and awarded internationally.

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Jonas KELLERMEYER, Jan TORPUS. Iterative Sensing & Sense-Making in Extended Realities – “ubiCombs” as a spatial means of investigating the condition of contemporary techno-social hybridity

With this contribution we would like to present and discuss the approach of the artistic research project “Technology – Human – Design. Paradigms of ubiquitous Computing” (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, 2019-2022), underlying theoretical implications, applied methods and first results. The interactive installation „ubiCombs” (https://ubicombs.ch) is an integral part of this project, which serves as the basis for our critical investigations of contemporary human-computer interaction.

The main questions connected to the setup of the research project as well as to the associated installation cluster around three main topics, which conceptually intersect to a great extent:

1. Technology: How do technological entities perceive the world? Which sensing routines are successively applied in resonance with and in contrast to human actors?

2. Human: What strategies do human actors in return develop to cognitively and emotionally open up a technologically expanded, responsive environment? How can they form lasting bonds with technological entities, successively even merging with them?

3. Design: Which design principles can be derived for an equitable and environmentally driven human-machine interaction? How does agency emerge from such a coupling process and to which degree does the design of linkages make a difference?

Jonas Kellermeyer is a cultural critic and a junior researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures. He is currently pursuing his PhD within the SNSF-funded project “Paradigms of UbiComp.
” His interests lie in the field of translational strategies between techno- and socio-logics. Interfaces – understood as fundamental translational structures that make it possible to bridge gaps and amplify them at the same time – and their relevance in relation to (human and non-human) perception, are his main concern.

Jan Torpus is a design and art researcher who develops practice-oriented research projects, works in interdisciplinary teams, and publishes primarily in the context of HCI. He investigates future and alternative techno-social lifeworlds and mindsets. Based on technological developments such as augmented reality and ubiquitous computing, he stages physical, immersive, interactive research settings that he examines with test persons to draw conclusions about experience, perception, behavior, and sense-making. Recently, he also applies his approach to ecology and biodiversity promotion in urban and recreational areas.

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Da Ye KIM. Embodied Experience of the Ultimate Border: DMZ in Virtual Reality

The DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) that divides the Korean peninsula into two ideologically opposing countries is a small strip of land full of paradox. It was first intended to symbolize a temporary cease-fire during the Korean War, but eventually became one of the most heavily fortified borders on earth. While the DMZ embodies the continuing remnants of war traumas, the no man’s land has been free of human development since the 1950s and thus ironically preserved as a “pristine ecological sanctuary”. It is an intriguing space where time is suspended.
This presentation looks into recent virtual reality (VR) films that deal with such unique characteristics of the DMZ. The embodied experience promised by VR technology allows the artists to immerse their viewers in the inaccessible space. I analyze how various artists have employed the technology to portray the DMZ as a utopic space of possibilities where temporal, spatial, and political borders are challenged. Hayoun Kwon’s 489 Years (2016), a documentary animation VR that recreates the DMZ by following the memories of a former soldier who had served in the area, and Fabienne Giezendanner’s Dreamin’ Zone (2020), a VR animation that depicts a young girl’s adventure into the DMZ in search of her lost father during the war, will be the two case studies.

Da Ye Kim is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She holds a BA in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University and an MA in Cinema Studies from NYU. Currently based in Seoul, her dissertation project envisions an extensive cartography of the VR mediascape, paying a particular attention to cinematic sites and laboring bodies that mobilize, structure and capitalize the emerging VR ecosystem. Her research interests include virtual reality, new media theories, cultural studies, Korean cinema and transnational media studies.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 1B. (VR/SENSE1) VIRTUAL SENSING AND
EXPERIENTIAL ART PRACTICES

Sander VEENHOF / Oksana CHEPELYK / Jānis GARANČS /
Dimitra KOUSTERIDOU / Paula VĪTOLA
MODERATOR MAIJA DEMITEREVenue: the National Library of Latvia

Sander VEENHOF. Zoom Ballet
Oksana CHEPELYK. Drift from Immersive Environments to VR: Ukrainian projects on Mozilla Hubs
Jānis GARANČS. Simulated Sensorium for Immersive Mappings of Ephemeral values in time
Dimitra KOUSTERIDOU. Surfaces In Becoming.
Paula VĪTOLA. Experiencing electricity

Sander VEENHOF. Zoom Ballet

Zoom Ballet – INSTRUCTIONS part 1
If you’re on a PC or Mac then you can join the Zoom Ballet session by running the “Snap Camera” software in the background. We’ll activate this AR software inside Zoom when the “Zoom Ballet” session starts. To be prepared, download this software program:
https://snapcamera.snapchat.com/download/

For more than a year our day to day reality consisted of videoconferencing. Our work life and much of our personal encounters happened in Zoom or Teams sessions. Some of us tried to make the best of it, experimenting with virtual backgrounds or AR facefilter effects. Sometimes, everyone started activating new filters every second. But instead of bringing a sense of togetherness, the feeling that gave was often one of being isolated, all enjoying our filter finds individually.
“Zoom ballet” is different, in many ways. It uses some of the filter functionality, but not to enhance people with fluffy bunny ears, which is fun for just a few seconds. Zoom ballet is based on a very minimalistic effect, just the movement of the screen.
Another aspect of Zoom ballet which empowers the experience is the synchronization. Thanks to a timer script, all movements of all people in one Zoom session are happening in sync. This ‘facefilter’ effect isn’t about an individual show-off but it’s a collective experience.
An adrenaline pumping experience too! Because after spending a year being a digital presence appearing in a virtual grid-organised world of little screens, a jumpy window almost feels like a physical experience. And a bit of adrenaline is what we might need, if this temporary reality is here to stay for a little longer.
https://meetyourstranger.com/ballet/

Sander Veenhof (NL, 1973) loves to spend time in semi-digital worlds. Programmable environments in particular. Although his curiosity relates to a far away future society in which we all live in a mixed reality universe, his art practice is hands-on and situated in the present. His present. Thanks to AR he is able to stage his own speculative real life versions of an imaginary universe, and live in it. By doing so he is able explore new (tech) domains from the inside out, with a focus on what it is like to become a semi-digital being enhanced with new super powers but limited by new boundaries too. Veenhof started creating cross-reality projects a decade ago in the avatar world Second Life, then moved on to AR and last year his playground was our Zoom reality. It turned us all into (programmable) digital appearances, so sitting still wasn’t an option for Veenhof. Nor for the attendees of his invite-only interactive Zoom sessions in which he tested various multi-user synchronised AR effects.
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Oksana CHEPELYK. Drift from Immersive Environments to VR: Ukrainian projects on Mozilla Hubs

The properties of the technological part of the environment, providing the psychological state of human, in which his “I” perceives himself wrapped, included and interacting with a certain environment, providing him/her with a continuous flow of stimulus-reactions and experience with reference to “Liquid Times” (Zygmunt Bauman, 2006) in the projects: “Meta-Physical Time-Space”, “Refraction of Reality”, when uncertainty becomes a constant and fluidity – a new urgency.
Projects ARTEFACT Chornobyl+MADATAC, “GENESIS”, “VR Collider” on Mozilla Hubs are in the focus of presentation. VR COLLIDER on Hubs is an architecture structure consisting of 4 platforms, which hang as a space station in the orbit of the planet Earth, capturing and decoding the vibrations of our time: hub.link/YGkQoSe.
Through spatial ideas, the project searches for Universe understanding referring to quantum physics, human consciousness in the age of algorithmic society, and postsensorium, as Chernobyl tragedy is an example of the biggest information catastrophe, when silence, manipulation, fake propaganda of the authority led to the real victims. Prypiat Room with GENESIS project works as a real-time birth-rate monitoring in Ukraine. It is a space shaped by walls-screens with 2D and 3D USE videos of the fetus and the body of a pregnant woman: https://hubs.mozilla.com/scenes/m98G5hq, https://youtu.be/WnGgQ_HuFcY.

Dr. Oksana Chepelyk is a leading researcher of the New Technologies Department, Modern Art Research Institute of Ukraine, author of book “The Interaction of Architectural Spaces, Contemporary Art and New Technologies” (2009) and curator of International Festival of Social Sculpture, Kyiv. Oksana studied art in Kyiv, followed PhD course, Moscow, Amsterdam University, Banff Centre, Canada, Bauhaus, Germany, Fulbright Research Program, UCLA, USA. Awards: ArtsLink1997/2007 Award (USA), FilmVideo99 (Italy), EMAF2003 Werklietz Award 2003 (Germany), Artraker Award2013 (UK), Best Project2018 (Taiwan). Works shown: MOMA, NY; MMA, Zagreb; German Historical Museum, Berlin and Munich; Museum of the Arts History, Vienna; MCA, Skopje; MJT, LA; Art Arsenal Museum, Kyiv; “DIGITAL MEDIA Valencia”, Spain; MACZUL, Maracaibo, Venezuela, “The File”, Sao Paolo; LPM-2016/2017 Amsterdam; MADATAC-2020, Madrid.

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Jānis GARANČS. Simulated Sensorium for Immersive Mappings of Ephemeral values in time

This presentation highlights main concepts and reflects on results of artwork/etude series that feature mappings the change of multiple values in feeds of ‘time-series data’ from e.g. financial transactions. These etudes are conceived as an interactive VR/AR installation and audiovisual performance interface. Ephemeral relationships are revealed and emphasized by the spatially organized audio-visual cues (perspective, sharpness/blur manipulation), audio-panning and timbral modulation (using 3D VR engine, live audio packages and sound spatialization). Various sound properties, such as pitch, timbre, rhythmic elements make mutual transition with visual representations of reference grids across curvilinear parameters.
These artwork series are thematically motivated by re-emergent and growing prominence of gambling factor in global economic activities (institutional promotion of investment products for masses, crypto-asset trading, online casinos, etc.). It appears that value storage and trading infrastructure increasingly merge with methods of manipulation of the human attention and emotions, and are mediated by computer networks, and increasingly – AI (Artificial Intelligence).
The investigative aspects are embedded in the emerging research area of immersive analytics, that is considered as a fusion of more recent developments in visualization, auditory displays, computing and machine learning, that has been developing in an ad-hoc way, and there have been recent efforts of elaborating the definition and proposing and organizing framework for the further research (Skarbez, Polys, Ogle, North, Bowman, 2019).
Else, the phenomenological mechanisms of the (somewhat speculative concept of) induced or ‘artificial synaesthesia’ are investigated, e.g. either as consequence from hypermedia (Bolter, 1991) or creating specific conditions where ‘Adults Can Be Trained to Acquire Synesthetic Experiences’ (Bor, D., Rothen, N., Schwartzman, D. et al, 2015), these etudes also investigate potentials of spatially expressive, ‘synthetic anisotropy instruments’ for the VR/AR staging of live data and are theoretical and practical investigation into the continuum between immersive analytics and VR/AR artwork.

Initially trained in classical arts, Jānis Garančs primarily works in technological and algorithmic art genres – interactive multi-media installations and performances, Virtual Reality. Since 2000 J.G. focuses on stereoscopic imagery, immersive 3D sound and combination of complex programmed, algorithmic structures with spontaneous gestures and live improvisation on-stage. He has exhibited and presented his work internationally at venues and events including Ars Electronica (1997,1998,2002), DEAF (Rotterdam), Transmediale (Berlin), ISEA (Helsinki 2004, Montreal 2020), Society for Art and Technology (Montreal), RIXC Art and Science Festival (Riga), EVA-LONDON, Banff New Media Institute, EXPO 2000 World Exhibition Hanover, and others. During 2006-2008 he was researcher team of EU -IST international research consortium ‘Live’ ( Institute for Media and Imaging Technologies / University of Applied Sciences, Cologne) – focusing on future interactive TV formats.

Dimitra KOUSTERIDOU. Surfaces In Becoming.

I would like to propose a piece situated between a performance and a sound installation exploring the concept of sym-poiesis simply translated as “making-with” which is in contrast to auto-poiesis, or self-making. The author Donna J. Haraway offers a redefinition of the Anthropocene, describing our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in symbiotic practices. I refer to viewpoint through the use of acoustics and built sound environments in which I employ found and self-made instruments, objects that channel and transpose the sound like a fixed piano, DIY circuits, piezo microphones, slow-drying matter such as clay, all connected rhizomatically and acting as a singular organism. The sympoetic system can be left to sound by itself, letting the environment cause the materials to undergo micro changes, determining the piece’s sonic structure, engaging the performer as a component of its circuit. I translate the capacity of the material itself to undergo microstructural and subtle changes in real time, revealing the potentiality of producing, not just parts and visual compositions that are assembled together, but vibrations that are captured as sound waves, rhythms that escape from within themselves. By exploring a field of vitality including the non-living realms, resonances between the rhythmic interfaces of the body, the observer and the living material assemblages, the circulation of energy and the alteration of matter, are composing new echosystems.

Dimitra Kousteridou (GR) is a multidisciplinary artist, currently lives and works in Athens, GR. Her Diploma in Art and Design was received from Akto Art and Design College, her Bachelor degree in Fine Arts from the Hanze University|Academy Minerva, Groningen, NL and obtaining a Master degree in Music Composition with New Media from the Musicology of National and Kapodistrian University Athens, GR.​
Her work is driven by a desire to invent a language in composition that examines tactile and sound aspects within site specific art installations, painting and improvisation. ​Through multidisciplinary forms that include installations, ephemeral situations and fractures of object ,she creates a space for research, while using the sound and aesthetics of the materials in time. Recently working on improvised sound compositions with handmade instruments (interactive handmade synthesizers). She has performed and exhibited in the UK,
the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Serbia and Greece.

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Paula VĪTOLA. Experiencing the Electricity

We don’t spend too much time thinking about electricity, signals and inner workings of technological devices around us until something stops working. Modern technologies have become so complex that a lot of it is impossible to comprehend even by experts.
Can we see and experience technology in a way that it makes sense without learning complicated technological concepts?
In my presentation I will discuss how artistic explorations in electrical signals might help us understand technology and shape our relationship with it.

Paula Vitola is an artist and lecturer at the University of Liepaja, mainly working in the field of media art and art research, as well as recently focusing on sound art. In her creative work, the artist is experimenting with different technologies, natural and physical phenomena, trying to understand them, finding new means of expression and ways to deal with them.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 2A. (XR2) EMBODIED EXPERIENCES AND EXTENDED REALITY

Geraldine WHARRY / Paola TOGNAZZI / Raivo KELOMEES / Maria NIKOLI / Leo SCARIN
Moderator Maija DEMITERE Venue: the National Library of Latvia

Geraldine WHARRY. Humans as Living code: Has data and code become the new skin?
Paola TOGNAZZI. AxX Be my skin, Protect Me, Feel Me, Carve yourself from my experiences
Raivo KELOMEES. Cooperative Aesthetics and Embodied Multi-user Interaction
Maria NIKOLI. Making room for the body: a multisensory sketching tool for architectural design
Leo SCARIN. Remote Embodiments: Collaborative Photogrammetry-making as a Bridge for Distant Bodies

Geraldine WHARRY. Humans as Living code: Has data and code become the new skin?

As the lines between our bodies, skin, and data blur, will our sense of self and, in turn our sense of beauty, start being defined by data? ‘Being human’ is a concept in flux – the lines between our bodies, skin, and data are blurring. As we collectively adopt biometrics, facial recognition, and surveillance capitalism, our identity is being redefined in what could be ‘the coded self’. What does our sense of beauty and self mean if what defines us most is our data, more than our own skin?
Human beings in a digital environment are becoming more and more like machines essentially defined by digital materials whilst the algorithms are becoming more and more like living entities. They act as if they are our evolutionary successors. We are creating a society where people will not be considered beautiful based on their physical attributes but mainly on their data and this will be considered their true selves, the data could be beautiful, it could be “ugly”, it reveals what we would rather hide. There is a sense what we are doing with data and machines is cannibalistic.

Geraldine Wharry is from Paris and is bi-cultural / bilingual French American, growing up traveling between the USA and France. She is a Fashion Futurist, Public Speaker, Educator and Designer with 20 years of experience working across the Fashion Industry. As one of the few experts with career expertise as a macro trend forecaster and a fashion design director, her work has been implemented with global leaders and has influenced agencies and brands in areas as diverse as Fashion, Sport, PR, Tech, Beauty, Retail, Innovation and Youth Culture in the USA, Europe and Asia.

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Paola TOGNAZZI. AxX Be my skin, Protect Me, Feel Me, Carve yourself from my experiences

AxX Be my skin, Protect Me, Feel Me, Carve yourself from my experiences is a practice based PHD on shapeshifting tapestries able to dance, and touch our skin, to amplify our sensorial perception and augment our reality. The title refers to programmable woven textiles able to feel and record the movement memories of the wearer, to then actively reproduce them, so the wearers can consciously feel them on their skins or transfer them to other persons faraway. The context of the study is human-interactive textiles relation and interfaces as source of pleasure. It emphasizes the central roles of material tactility in tapestry, to transfer information, of the skin to mediate human sensory perception and of interactivity to amplify the listening ability of the body. Together, they build a system of embodied experiences that moves away from tapestry as material representation towards tapestry as Material Art that allows humans to transform and feel themselves. Materials and garments already store traces of the memory of past movements, the question of this research is how to capture, reproduce and control the directions of these movements, integrating soft robotics with tapestry techniques to intentionally transfer them in such a way to touch, communicate and produce a narrative of feelings in the body. It proposes techniques to embed movement in woven textiles and create adaptative patterns, able to support and accommodate the movement directions sent by the soft robotic actuators, to create a symbiotic process of shape transformation between the textile and real time data instructions.
Bio: Paola Tognazzi artist and physical interaction design.In 2008 founded Wearable_Dynamics specialised in the production of immersive interactive environments that invite participants to become performers. Her expertise lies in movement patterns recognition, body anatomy, deep procedural routines to analyse filter, map data that make movements individual, special, different, and the application of movement capture sensors to create body informed mutually informing systems.
In 2014 she has proven the concept of REACTIVE 3D PRINTED WEARABLES with The Dragon is Alive, a 3D printed wearable skin able to change shape, interacting with the movements of the wearer. The project was developed at the Wearable Senses department of the Tu/e University of Eindhoven in collaboration with the dutch companies Xsens and Freadom of creation (3D Systems) and fashion designer Pauline Van Dongen.Currently she is doing a PHD at the Universities of Napier and the University of Edinburgh collaborating with Dovecot Studio on: Future Skins, 21st Century tapestry. Interactive performing textiles able to amplify our sensorial perception and augment our reality.

Paola Tognazzi artist and physical interaction design. In 2008 founded Wearable_Dynamics an art company specialised in the production of interactive wearables that give superpowers, enhance physical awareness and invite wearers to become performers. In 2014 she has proven the concept of REACTIVE 3D PRINTED WEARABLES with The Dragon is Alive, a 3D printed wearable skin able to change shape, interacting with the movements of the wearer. The project was developed at the Wearable Senses department of the Tu/e University of Eindhoven. Currently she is doing a PHD at the Universities of Napier and Edinburgh collaborating with Dovecot Studio on: Future Skins, 21st Century tapestry. Interactive performing textiles able to amplify our sensorial perception and augment our reality.

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Raivo KELOMEES. Cooperative Aesthetics and Embodied Multi-user Interaction

As a rule, interactive artworks are used by a single person. However there are works which are open to simultaneous participation of several people. It could be an additional option of work, not even meant by the author. My goal is to follow artworks which are designed for multiple users and interactors and which artistic content evolve in collaboration of two or more persons. The artwork’s cooperative features are conceptually embedded into the artwork.
I am discussing several works from different decades and end the talk with examples where participants of the work are physically, chemically and bio-sensorially part of the artwork. As it is evident with the works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer “Vicious Circular Breathing” (2013) Lisa Jevbratt’i, Anne-Marie Hansen and Dan Overholt “Pulse” (2006), Karen Lancel’i ja Hermen Maat’i “E.E.G. Kiss” (2014) the participants are sharing and combining their physiological information to become a synergetic collaborative body.
Also I would like to discuss the concept of “cooperative aesthetics” of professor Gerhard Funk and environments where several users can build cooperative visual environments.

Works for discussion:
G.R.A.V. “Day in the Street” (1966)
Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz „Hole in Space“ 1980)
Radúz Činčera “Kino-automat“
“Cause & Effect” Chris Hales and Teijo Pellinen
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer “Pulse Room”, “Pulse Index”, “Vicious Circular Breathing”, “People on People” (2010), “Zoom Pavilion” (2015)
Ulrike Gabriel’i “terrain_02”
Sommereri/Mignonneau “Mobile Feelings” (2002-3)
Sonia Cillari “Se mi sei vicino” (2006)
Golan Levin’i “Dialtones” (A Telesymphony, 2001)
You Must Relax (Riin Rõõs, Eve Arpo) “A Day without a Mobile Phone” 2007, “Musical Etude for Mobile Phones”, 2009
“Bump”, C. Smretschnig, M. Bieglmayer, R. Graf, W. Schmid, 2001
Maurice Benayoun and Jean-Baptiste Barierre “World Skin (1997)
Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat “E.E.G. Kiss”
Lisa Jevbratt, Anne-Marie Hansen, Dan Overholt’i “Pulse” (2006)
Gerhard Funk “Cooperative aesthetics” project
Erik Alalooga “Cinematic Mystery” 2009-2018
Reimo Võsa-Tangsoo “We wanted the Best” (2010)
Juhan Soomets “Artists’ Room” (2016)
Raivo Kelomees “List of Insults” (2015)

Raivo Kelomees, PhD (art history), artist, critic and new media researcher. Studied psychology, art history, and design in Tartu University and the Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Has published in main cultural and art magazines and newspapers of Estonia since 1985. Book author, “Surrealism” (Kunst Publishers, 1993) and an article collections “Screen as a Membrane” (Tartu Art College proceedings, 2007), “Social Games in Art Space” (Estonian Academy of Arts, 2013). Doctoral thesis „Postmateriality in Art. Indeterministic Art Practices and Non-Material Art“ (Dissertationes Academiae Artium Estoniae 3, 2009).

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Maria NIKOLI. Making room for the body: a multisensory sketching tool for architectural design

Grounded in a critique of ocularcentrism in contemporary architecture, this paper introduces a novel multisensory sketching tool for architects, and explains how embodied interaction design methods may offer possibilities that expand the exclusively visual process of architectural ideation. It is based on a project called “SOUNDMAT: A Sonic and Kinesthetic Tool for Architects”. Situated in the genre of physical computing, this project involved the design of a prototype that lets users sketch embodied spatial experiences while immersed in an interactive soundscape. Apart from helping architects and other spacemakers renew their focus on the embodied nature of lived experience, the innovation of this paper is to examine non-sight-centered, full-body spatial sketching, a topic that has not been widely explored, triggering discussions between disciplines such as architecture, interaction design, and the arts. The methods used in the present paper are shaped by three main areas of theory: embodied interaction design theory, phenomenology, and a contemporary view of the self as an inseparable whole of mind and body. Lastly, this paper attempts to critically evaluate this novel sketching tool, discussing the risks that may arise from its use, and the potential that its use might hold.

Maria Nikoli holds a master’s degree in Architecture from the Democritus University of Thrace, and is an MSc candidate in Interaction Design at Malmö University. She is currently a Teaching Assistant in the Malmö University based “Institute of Interactive Objects”. She has previously worked as a web designer, as a lead architect in the restoration of a historical residence in Greece, and as a researcher at Interreg PALIMPSEST, an EU-funded research project that involved the design of an interactive, mixed-reality museum of storytelling in Greece and Italy. Her work and research in designing interactive objects and spaces has been awarded and published in international conferences.

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Leo SCARIN. Remote Embodiments: Collaborative Photogrammetry-making as a Bridge for Distant Bodies

In the context of a global isolation, video-conferences and social media have played a center role in bridging human distances through net-communication. However—in lack of physical interactions—we developed a new connotation of tangibility, as well as alternative experiential implications. In fact, the advancement of digital technologies paved the way for hyper-real experiences, allowing us to augment, or else escape our reality, yet undervaluing our very first media of communication: the body and the memory.
In his work, interactive media artist Leo Scarin explores photogrammetry technologies as a way to bridge the distance with his intimatest friends. They are instructed to produce 3D scans of their living spaces to share with him, in a collaborative effort to communicate on a more spatial and bodily level. An emotional process matures along the work as they give away an intimate look into their life, transfered into a safe space in virtual reality. They can be with each other, remotely embodied, with their memories together present.
How do we design the future experiences of digital interaction bringing back our attention to the body and the memory?

The conference will include questions and conclusions from my thesis “Loading Title… (on loss of tangibility in digitization)” along with the artistic and technical process employed for my work Variations on a Remote Room and for my new upcoming work Fragments.

Links:
Thesis – https://issuu.com/scarscarin/docs/loadingtitle
Work impressions – https://youtu.be/Bzd0RkQHUm4
Work walkthrough – https://youtu.be/763U3bi7rLE

🦁 Leo Scarin is a new media artist and designer from Italy, based in The Hague, NL.

🎯 In his artistic practice, Leo investigates the bridge between new technologies and the human senses, by creating spaces for more intimate and conscious digital interactions. His research sparks from the aesthetics and techniques of bodily and sensorial digitization.

🤖 Growing up as part of a digital generation Leo’s body of work integrates media such as video art, audiovisual performances and interactive installations, mixing media and systems. The interdisciplinary nature of Leo’s work brings him to collaborate with sound, dance, and theatre artists, transforming his work into a tool for extended contexts of performance.

🎓 He graduated in Interactive/Media/Design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, in 2021. His work has been included in exhibition and residency programs by the Eye Filmmuseum, TodaysArt, V2_Lab for Unstable Media, The Grey Space in the Middle and Stroom.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 2B. (VR/SENSE2) VIRTUAL SENSING
AND EXPERIENTIAL ART PRACTICES

Karla BRUNET / Paul WIERSBINSKI / Julian PRIEST / Anna PRIEDOLA / Pavel RUZYAK
Moderator Solvita ZARINAVenue: the National Library of Latvia

Karla BRUNET. Narratives of Nature: Ebro Delta’s Artistic-Scientific insights (Brazil)
Paul WIERSBINSKI. Remote Rules and Rituals
Julian PRIEST. Expeditionary Reconnections
Anna PRIEDOLA. Tasting Information
Pavel RUZYAK. Filming Technology for Visually Impaired People

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Karla BRUNET. Narratives of Nature: Ebro Delta’s Artistic-Scientific insights (Brazil)

This talk intends to present the creative process of sensing and experience the region of Ebro Delta. As part of a larger project about the Mediterranean Sea, these insights from the Ebro River constructed narratives collected during the days in locuo. It is a mixture of collected data as the salinity, ph, and conductivity of the river and seawater with stories heard and recorded during the field trips.
A bicycle and a kayak were the locomotion mean to reach different points of the Delta. Digital portable water testers were the way to perceive the water trying to understand its data. Video and photo cameras were the way to record a more subjective view of the landscapes experienced. Maps, trackers, and a GPS watch were the tools for the geographic visualization of the place and the journeys undergone.
The process of sensing the Delta through experiential art practice created nature narratives and enhanced my sensibility to this region where the river encounters the sea, and the sea is influenced by the river.

Karla Brunet is an artist and researcher, holds a PhD in Audiovisual Communication (UPF, Spain – CAPES Scholarship) and a Masters in Arts (Academy of Art University, USA – CAPES Scholarship). In 2009-2011, Karla coordinated the Labdebug, a laboratory focused on women and free technologies. In 2012 she was curator of FACMIL/LabMAM, a media art lab at MAM Bahia. In 2014, she carried out postdoctoral research at UDK, Berlin. She is currently a visiting researcher at UPV, Spain. Karla is a professor at IHAC/UFBA and coordinates Ecoarte, an interdisciplinary group on art, technology and the environment. Her artistic practices involve photography, video art, data visualization, sensory environment, hybrid art, audiovisual performance, webart, artistic mapping and game, always focusing on experiences in nature.

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Paul WIERSBINSKI. Remote Rules and Rituals

How can the rituals of theater be used to portray the ritualism of spiritual machines. How do we use them to make predictions about an uncertain future?
The audience was invited to participate actively in a collective ritual, exploring their living spaces and charging everyday objects with new meaning without leaving their home.
The French mathematician Jean-Luc-Chabert stated that “algorithms have been around since the beginning of time. They are a set of step-by-step instructions, to be carried out quite mechanically”. Algorithms could therefore be seen as ancient as human civilization itself. Our rituals, our dances, indigenous techniques to navigate have always been rulesets to discover patterns and with their help make predictions.
The aim of the project is for viewers to follow the camera movement of a live stream on their smartphone as if in a choreography, which creates “agency”, the strange feeling of being active themselves and of becoming the director of this virtual gaze and not just being a consumer of a pre-produced digital experience. Always with the ulterior motive that illusion, originally literally “in-lusio”, describes nothing more than “entering the game”.

https://vimeo.com/506453467
Passwort: RRR docu

Paul Wiersbisnki has studied video art with Mark Leckey and Douglas Gordon at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (Main) and currently lives and works in Berlin. His projects are conducted in between the lines of art, science and technology, touching discourses on artificial intelligence, entomology or cybernetics and referring to the history of performance and video art, as well as utilising notions of jest and improvisation. Often he constructs technical prototypes, which are tried out by the public and go through various phases of continuous development. His work has been presented in intl. Exhibitions: “RECORD > AGAIN!”, ZKM Karlsruhe (2009), “The indifference of Wisdom”, NURTUREart New York City (2013), “Risk Society”, MOCA Taipei (2013), “Showcase”, SPACE London (2018), “Offline Browser“, Hong-Gah Museum Taiwan (2018-2019), “Datami”, BOZAR Bruessels (2019-2020) / festivals &screenings: SALT Beyoğlu Istanbul (2012), Luminato Festival Toronto (2014), European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück (2010, 2014, 2015, 2017), “IN/OUT“ Festival of the National Gallery Amman (2019) and received various prices and grands, such as support from Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin.

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Julian PRIEST. Expeditionary Reconnections

In an increasingly digital, urbanised and anthropogenic world, an experience of direct connection with the local physical, cultural, ecological, network, and technological environments is often lost. Experience is continually mediated and abstracted by multiple layers creating a distance between individual experience and the supporting ecology. This distance can work against the possibility of environmental action. Re-connection can be established through an expeditionary residency technique where a group journeys through a land or sea scape, in the context of local knowledge producing new cultural work in the process.

Expeditionary reconnections reflects on the experience of the 2009-11 Slow Flow series of interdisciplinary river expeditions in New Zealand, and outlines ongoing attempts to generalise the methodology using the SÆT framework as a starting point for a new expedition series for the Baltic region.

Julian Priest (1968) is a NZ/UK artist currently living in Denmark and exhibiting internationally. His early work was with community free wireless networks, radio spectrum and the Internet. He now uses a wide range of participatory and technological forms exploring themes including infrastructures, time, energy, security, space, environment, gravity and communications.
His most recent artwork ‘The Weight of Information’ was an art satellite which was in low earth orbit between Nov 2018 and March 2019. This was accompanied by a participatory installation at the Thomas King Observatory in Wellington. Currently he is developing new work using expeditionary methodologies in the Baltic region.
He has lectured at A.U.T University, Massey University and Victoria University of Wellington, and is currently working with student satellites at IT University of Copenhagen.
http://julianpriest.org

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Anna PRIEDOLA. Tasting Information

Smell and taste have been essential senses for human survival and development but have lost their importance in an environment of rapidly changing visual and audial signals and stimuli. The overload of visual information can become a background noise and thus filtered out by the human perception.
In their latest art project author is exploring dementia and loss of cognitive abilities presenting global and local dementia statistics in edible data visualisations, and running Mindful Meal workshops with dementia patients stimulating embodied perception of abstract information (especially when the ability for abstract expression in language is lost). Growing amount of research also links the importance of diet to sustain cognitive health for seniors. Thus the art project serves both as an informative and healing experience for the participants and spectators.
The sensory – tactile, olfactory and gustatory – perception of today’s consumer is put to a test in the project “The Book of Food” – a cook book made of edible pages to be smelled, licked and used as a starter for the meal.

Anna Priedola is an interdisciplinary artist that has explored data visualisations using food as a material in art since 2017, showcasing social and economic issues of the “data recipes”.

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Pavel RUZYAK. Cinema Technology for Visually Impaired People

I am a film-maker who is now leading my own unique social and artistic project – a film club for visually impaired children. Here, the handicapped children are able to learn film-making and create their own films through innovative methods.
During the lessons with children though, we have found one major setback – the work with camera and editing software is quite challenging for children who do not see, as they need constant assistance because the hard-/soft- ware is not meant for visually handicapped people.
This is exactly what I want to research and change, proposing a break-through project that connects science, arts and social aspects. The topics to be addresses is AI, image-to-voice recognition of the camera, voice assistance, simple design of hardware, voice assistance for software…
At the conference, I would like to share my experience with a film club I am leading and also about our concept in development of the special hardware and software ideas.

Pavel Ruzyak is a film-maker also active in social field, working on fiction and documentary films with social topics, along with developing a film club for visually impaired young people. Currently working on a
connected technological project facilitating cinema and visual handicap. Co-operating on the project
with an NGO Osvěta z.s. in Prague, Czech Republic, where he is based.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 3A. (AI/DATA). INTELLIGENT ECOSYSTEMS AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONDITIONS

Ellen PEARLMAN / Jonah BRUCKER-COHEN / Sean MONTGOMERY / Vincenzo SANSONE
Moderator Rasa SMITEVenue: the National Library of Latvia

Ellen PEARLMAN. AIBO – How To Build A ‘Sicko’ AI Using GPT-3
Jonah BRUCKER-COHEN. Deconstructing The Human Machine Relationship
Sean MONTGOMERY. EmotiBit, Transdisciplinary Biometric Sensing and Democratizing the Future of Augmented Cognition
Vincenzo SANSONE. Theatre and Artificial Intelligence: from robots to algorithms that perform on the stage. What is happening?

Ellen PEARLMAN. AIBO – How To Build A ‘Sicko’ AI Using GPT-3

Artificial Intelligent (AI) agents are exponentially increasing in power and sophistication. With the addition of OpenAI’s breakthrough new algorithm GPT-2 (now GPT-3) into the toolbox of developers, the ability to mimic human dialogue and produce fake, but believable interactions between humans and computer-based agents is fully upon us. In developing “AIBO” (Artificial Intelligent Brainwave Opera), an emotionally intelligent artificial intelligent brainwave opera, I created a biased, or ‘sicko’ AI as one of the two main characters. This has been created in response to one of my research questions, “Can an AI be fascist?” This paper explores the construction a ‘sicko’ or perverted AI for artistic use as part of the overall process of developing an AI brainwave opera.

Dr. Ellen Pearlman is a new media artist, critic, curator and writer who created Noor: A Brain Opera, the world’s first immersive interactive brain opera in a 360 degree theater. Ellen has a PhD from the School of Creative Media, Hong Kong City University, where her thesis was awarded Highest Honors Internationally by Leonardo LABS Abstracts. She is on the faculty of Parsons/New School University, and a Senior Researcher, Assistant Professor at RISEBA University in Riga, Latvia. A Fulbright World Learning Specialist in Art, New Media and Technology she is also an EU Vertigo STARTS Horizon 2020 Laureate, a Zero1 American Arts Incubator Fellow in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a contributing editor to Performance Arts Journal (PAJ) MIT Press. Ellen is also President of Art-A-Hack™ and Director and Curator of the New York Volumetric Society.

Jonah BRUCKER-COHEN. Deconstructing The Human Machine Relationship

This presentation will focus on several projects that bring to light implicit biases that are found in software systems meant to make our lives easier while also infringing on our beliefs and values. I will discuss a series of projects I have created within the theme of “Human Error” that examine all of the things we do “wrong” with technology and how we could integrate them into existing software and hardware systems to humanize these technologies further. I will also speak about two projects “To Protect and Server” and “Weapon of Protest” that aim to examine how mainstream technological software and hardware could be altered to interject a political conscience in order to shed light on how we as a society deal with social justice issues such as police brutality and gun violence. Finally I will bring to light other projects in this theme that aim to question our ability to generate a shared understanding and rectification of these issues at hand.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Ph.D., is an artist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Lehman College / CUNY in the Bronx. He received his Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin. His work focuses on “Deconstructing Networks” with works that challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction. His artwork has been exhibited at venues such as SFMOMA, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Art, MOMA, ICA London, Whitney Museum of American Art, Palais du Tokyo, Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and more. His artworks, “Bumplist” and “America’s Got No Talent” are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has written for WIRED, Make, Gizmodo, Neural and more. His Scrapyard Challenge workshops have been held in over 15 countries in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, and Australia since 2003.
Link: http://www.coin-operated.com
Twitter: @coinop29

Sean MONTGOMERY. EmotiBit, Transdisciplinary Biometric Sensing and Democratizing the Future of Augmented Cognition

Electrical and chemical signals are constantly traveling throughout our brains and bodies, carrying sensations, thoughts, emotions and our reactions to the world around us. Sensing these signals and how they are altered by external stimuli and internal contexts gives us a window into ourselves and how we can enhance our health, well-being and capabilities in the 21st century. However, closed-source sensors combined with limited data access and black-box algorithms hampers efforts to understand the body and mind, stunts transdisciplinary cross-pollination, and opens the door to innumerable dystopian futures. After nearly 3 years of development and testing with partners around the world, my lab recently launched EmotiBit (https://www.EmotiBit.com/), a wearable open-source sensor platform for capturing emotional, physiological, and movement data. I’ll share examples of collaborations using EmotiBit, including a transnational and transdisciplinary project with Battery Dance Studio (NYC) and ThoughtWorks Art-A-Hack utilizing biometric data to reimagine dance performance in a post-pandemic world. I’ll discuss how a low-cost sensor can help democratize Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research, create more dialog between artistic and scientific inquiry, and enable more voices to participate in the conversation about a future in which internal context combined with artificial intelligence play a central role in augmenting human cognition.

Sean Montgomery is a technologist, educator and new-media artist working at the intersection of art, science and technology. Using research methodologies combined with emerging technologies, Sean takes a trans-disciplinary look at the human condition to examine the changing relationship between the physical and metaphysical world. From developing wearable bio-sensors and algorithms that derive meaning from sensor data to creating interactive new-media art installations that have shown around the world, Sean’s work focuses on how technology can enhance our understanding of ourselves and create new ways for people to interact with one another and the objects around them. His lab recently launched EmotiBit (https://www.EmotiBit.com/), a wearable open-source biometric sensor to make it easy for everyone from researchers and educators to artists and DIYers to begin working with high-quality biometric signals and generate greater transdisciplinary dialog about sensing and making sense out of biometrics data. Learn more about Sean’s work at http://produceconsumerobot.com/

Vincenzo SANSONE. Theatre and Artificial Intelligence: from robots to algorithms that perform on the stage. What is happening?

In 2019 Rimini Protokoll company presented Uncanny Valley on the theatre scene. It’s a performance in which the actor is a robot with human features so delineated as to cause a sense of uneasiness, the so-called uncanny valley effect. This performance is one of the latest results, perhaps the most evident, of the entrance of artificial intelligence to the theatre. Spectators can watch a performance performed entirely by a robot, as if Gordon Craig’s paradigm Über-marionette were somehow realised. In the history of theatre and new technologies, we can find several examples of robots on stage, but nowadays the issue must go beyond the simple use of automatons more or less similar to humans, substitutes for the actor. Today the concept of Artificial Intelligence is becoming more and more prevalent in the theatre, a phenomenon in which the algorithm becomes an autonomous being, which performs at its own will on the stage not necessarily using robots. What is happening on the theatre stage? How is artificial intelligence modifying the stage? Through a path with examples, we will trace how and to what extent AI has been influencing the stage, trying to outline a hypothesis for the future.

Vincenzo Sansone, master’s degree in Digital Performance (Sapienza University of Rome), is PhD in Studi Culturali Europei/Europäische Kulturstudien (University of Palermo). He was visiting scholar at Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona and at Polytechnic University of Valencia. The focus of his research concerns these areas: the performing arts, new media, animation, AR technologies, software culture, visual culture. He is also an actor and digital set designer. In 2021 he published his first book Scenografia Digitale e Interattività. Il video projection mapping nuova macchina teatrale della visione (Aracne Editrice). Currently he is adjunct professor at the University of Milan and Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 3B. (AI/BIO). LIVING TECHNOLOGIES, AI & BIOPOLITICS

Byron RICH / Maija DEMITERE / Riad SALAMEH / Alla SEMENOVSKAYA, Eva LINDSAY, Dhruv Shah aka LODAYA
Moderator Solvita ZARINAVenue: the National Library of Latvia

Byron RICH, Kylie RIMES, Kai’lani WOODARD. The Suburbs of Accra
Maija DEMITERE. Lifestyle Trends and Deep Sustainability
Riad SALAMEH. Biopolitics of post-biological bodies on the web: Performance of the internet self as an agent of surveillance capitalism
Alla SEMENOVSKAYA, Eva LINDSAY, Dhruv Shah aka LODAYA. Microplot: genomic technologies as a potential tool of revelation for deliberate terraforming

Byron RICH, Kylie RIMES, Kai’lani WOODARD. The Suburbs of Accra

The Suburbs of Accra uses augmented reality to unveil the often hidden ramifications of technological obsolescence by using augmented reality to place family photos and information harvested from hard drives at e-waste sites in Accra, Ghana. The project is intended to demonstrate how neocolonialism manifests in the continued marginalization of people living in emerging economies and developing countries. Additionally, The Suburbs of Ghana calls attention to the environmental devastation levied on developing nations via e-waste sites.
Intended as a comment on the hidden, or more accurately, ignored human and environmental cost of our societal obsession with ‘newness’, The Suburbs of Accra is the first of a series of new works that will use AR to facilitate exploration of locales where neocolonialism is taking a devastating toll on the environment and its human and non-human inhabitants. As heavy metals become more difficult to mine, recycling obsolete technologies becomes increasingly important, however like ship breaking and plastics recycling (the subjects of two subsequent works in the series) emerging economies and developing nations bear the majority of the costs associated with enabling the cycle of unnecessary replacement perpetuated by a concerted effort between corporations and governments aimed at maximizing shareholder returns.
We would love to speak about the work and the complex, intertwining factors that underpin its development.

Byron Rich is an artist, professor and lecturer born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His work exploring speculative design, biology futures and tactical media has been widely shown and spoken about internationally. He pursued a degree in New-Media at The University of Calgary before relocating to Buffalo, New York where he obtained an MFA in Emerging Practices at The University at Buffalo.He was the runner up for the 2016 BioArt & Design Award, and the recipient of an Honorary Mention at the 2017 Prix Ars Electronica. He now serves as Director of Academic Innovation Partnerships, and Associate Professor of Art at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.

Kylie Rimes (she/they) is a research assistant at Allegheny College, coming from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and pursuing a major in Business and a double minor in Communications and Art, Science, and Innovation. They are in a Sorority, KKG, and the Rotaract Club, holding a board position as head PR.

Kai’lani Woodard is a student and research assistant from Kittanning, PA. She is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Art, Science and Innovation at Allegheny College. She is a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma Gamma Rho chapter and serves as the Public Relations Chairman.

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Maija DEMITERE. Lifestyle Trends and Deep Sustainability

Living a sustainable lifestyle is essentially very straightforward and very boring (consume less, consume local, eat less, eat local, eat vegan). The presentation will explore how unique and valid are ecological ideas and policies that are in the zeitgeist, popularised in the social media and mainstream journalism today – being ecological in the times of fitfluencers, vegan-moms and internet-assembled philosophies.

Maija Demitere is an artist, researcher and a doctoral student at Liepaja University. Her main fields of research are deep sustainability, slow media art, developing art research and presentation methods that could offer different lifestyles – promoting individual self-sustainability.

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Riad SALAMEH. Biopolitics of post-biological bodies on the web: Performance of the internet self as an agent of surveillance capitalism

This research examines the post-biological body’s entanglement with surveillance capitalism through a central research question: how does the internet’s infrastructure transform the nature of bodies in relation to biopower? To address it, I examine the transformative turn of using bodies as tools of material and immaterial labor into the extraction of bodies into a commodity for surveillance capitalism. Critical phenomenology provides a method for understanding how models of surveillance function, specifically concerning bodies that do not fit within the normative categories and universalizing assumptions that internet systems are predicated on. Feminist, queer thinking, and imaginative computation can be seen as models to reshape this infrastructure. I investigate why algorithmic systems are designed to erase a particular set of identities and question whether it is possible for the labor of artists/activists working on the internet to move beyond the binaries of algorithmic classifications. This research established a net-performance titled Economy of my body, as to provide a lived account of the experience of the economy and labor attached with being online. Auto-ethnography is part of the critically reflexive practice that allows one to experience the body more deeply as it is perceived, optimized, essentialized, and co-opted by neoliberal forms of power.

Riad Salameh is a researcher and art practitioner with a graphic design, art mediation and media arts cultures background. His work often follows a praxis method that uses micro-transformations as to respond to the urgency of collective socio-economic transformations. Looking into the ownership of bodies in cyberspaces, investigating internet capital and physiological needs of the everyday, he critically investigates economies and its interlink to biopower. His interests relate to the abstraction of the physical and digital self through performance, web-navigation, irony, humor and intimacy. He has exhibited in Lebanon, Denmark, Georgia, England, Pakistan and online. He is currently a digital design resident at Fikra Designs in Sharjah.

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Alla SEMENOVSKAYA, Eva LINDSAY, Dhruv Shah aka LODAYA. Microplot: genomic technologies as a potential tool of revelation for deliberate terraforming

The project is a call to recalibrate the approach to design by recognizing the microbiome as an additional parameter and overlooked agent of terraforming. The technological mediation of the continuous, interchangeable and entangled relationships between microbiomes, environments and ourselves allows for higher resolutions of perception in the way we compose synthetic landscapes.
When germ theory originally framed microbes as pathogens, design was driven by “sterilization” and aimed at the “extermination” of microbial life and the production of highly tempered and sealed environments, propelling a culture of cleanliness. With the potential advancement and accessibility of metagenomic sequencing, we may be at the cusp of refining our understanding of these microbial systems, and reframing our design practices from the reactory to the nuanced, adaptive, and proactive.
Manifesting alternative, more precise compositions across various sites and scales of intervention, the project narrates how sequencing could become a potential design tool to inform deliberate terraforming.

Alla Semenovskaya is an interdisciplinary researcher and consultant based in Russia, with a background in strategic business development and launching emerging technologies. She is a graduate in Asian and African Studies from National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow, and a fellow of the postgraduate design-research program «The Terraforming» of the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. Her recent work has specialised in research projects and site specific collaborative practices, exploring comparative governance, climate policies, and implications of computational technologies. She is interested in how interspecies connections inform our perception of assembled ecosystems.
asemenovskaya@yahoo.com, https://www.facebook.com/aasemenovskaya/

Eva Lindsay is an architect and set designer. Since graduating from the Glasgow School of Art she has worked in various design studios in Rotterdam, Paris, Brussels and Berlin. Recently she took part in a second cycle research program “The Terraforming” at the Strelka Institute. Eva’s work has specialised in research projects ranging from problematising planning systems to futureproofing infrastructure space. The work has been displayed in various formats including exhibitions, films and publications.
evalindsay@live.com, https://www.facebook.com/eva.lindsay.9

Dhruv Shah Aka Lodaya is an Architect and Architectural Historian residing in Vadodara, India. After completing his Bachelor of Architecture in India, Dhruv has graduated with a master’s in Architectural History from University College London (UCL) Bartlett, London, UK. He was also a part of the second cycle of the Terraforming research program run at the Strelka Institute, Moscow. He is currently working as an assistant professor at Anant University In India, involved in academia, research, and curatorial architectural practice. Working closely with the medium of Text and Image, his interests lie in the intersection of projected power, politics, and placemaking.
dhruvshah317@gmail.com, https://www.facebook.com/dhruv.shah.79274

ARTIST KEYNOTE TALK

Špela PETRIČ. Of Algos, Plants and the Vegetariat
Moderator Rasa SMITE

Špela PETRIČ. Of Algos, Plants and the Vegetariat

CONFRONTING VEGETAL OTHERNESS (2015-2018) and the PLANT-MACHINE (2018-ongoing) are two art-research opuses within which I examine the possibilities of post-anthropocentric relationships with plants. Oftentimes developed in interdisciplinary collaboration, the artworks are rooted in the realisation that the contemporary (bio)technological subsumption of life requires ever-adapting modes of social and political engagement. Underpinned by (bio)informatics, the algorithmically-enhanced form of biopolitics decodes people in fragmented contexts of connections and dependencies, and which uncannily resembles the traditional understanding of plants. In Western thought, plants are conceived of as beings simple enough to be discerned, fully comprehended and subsequently controlled/managed. In the presented series of artworks I insist on intensifying the relationship between information technology and plants, identifying in it two critical features of the current situation: the urgency to reconstruct our relationship to plants, and the ontological flattening in which plants and the statistical human essentially become equal. Despite questioning the use and power of technology and its tools, I refuse to critique from a safe distance, instead experimenting with appropriation or subversion. In the context of the artworks, bodies and data become the raw material for non-utilitarian, speculative representations of plant life in the sphere of information.

Špela Petrič is a Ljubljana and Amsterdam based new media artist who has been trained in the natural sciences and holds a PhD in biology, currently working as a researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her artistic practice combines the natural sciences, wet biomedia practices, performance, and critically examines the limits of anthropocentrism via multi-species endeavours. She envisions artistic experiments that enact strange relations to reveal the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of our (bio)technological societies. Petrič received several awards, such as the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria).

Artist Presentations. VIRTUAL SENSING AND EXPERIENTIAL ART PRACTICES.

Clement VALLA / Daniel HENGST / Carly LAVE
Moderator Rasa SMITE

Clement VALLA. Pointcloud Garden
Daniel HENGST. Plants Per Second ‒ Towards a Plant Oriented Rendering Methodology.
Carly LAVE. The Golem-Labor: Researching Motion Capture Technology + Dance

Clement VALLA. Pointcloud Garden

The artist will discuss his works that come from an interest in how contemporary digital pictures of nature are constructed. The artists discusses his pictures, how they feel, how they translate space into a a flat surface, and how they situate an audience in an ambiguous time and a different kind of space.

Clement Valla is a New York based artist whose work considers how humans and computers are increasingly entangled in making, seeing and reading pictures.
He has had recent solo exhibitions at PC Galleries in Providence, XPO Gallery in Paris and Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn. His work has also been exhibited at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Breda, Netherlands; Bitforms Gallery, New York; Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, France; Haus der Photographie, Hamburg, Germany; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; KIM Contemporary Art Center, Riga, Latvia; Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh; and The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis;
His work has been cited in The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, El Pais, Huffington Post, Rhizome, Domus, Wired, The Brooklyn Rail, Liberation, and on BBC television. Valla received a BA in Architecture from Columbia University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Digital+Media. He is currently an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.

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Daniel HENGST. Plants Per Second ‒ Towards a Plant Oriented Rendering Methodology.

Plants appear in many digital environments in various forms. Compared to human bodies or human artifacts, they mostly appear highly stylized. They seem to be a part of the background against which the main action, usually human action, takes place. Thereby, their actual morphology, their species or/and biological community in which they can exist is very rarely of interest. Their visibility is therefore very low. As in the real world, plants are meant to serve humans and human self-realization.
How can a methodology be imagined that allows plants to have explicit visibility in digital environments? A lot of people visit more often digital environments than natural ones. Digital plants can represent and speak for themselves and can help to overcome a widespread blindness for plants. Detailed modeled plant avatars can show their beauty and their unconditional love for all other living beings, and thereby ignite in humans a passionate relationship with their real-life paragons.
The current technical benchmark for the performance of an application in creating real-time digital environments is “FPS”: an shortcut for “frames per second”. It is a value that indicates how many frames a computer can compute per second. A new guideline value “PPS” ‒ Plants per Seconds ‒ could be an orientation point, how many plants per second, with what level of detail and accuracy ‒ and therefore what level of affection and degree of visibility ‒ can be calculated.

In a 15 to 20 minute talk with a screencast from the 3D program Blender, the plant creation software PlantFactory, as well as pre-recorded videos, I would like to talk about the following points:
1. Current techniques and methodologies of digital plantation
2. Reasons and goals of a PPS methodology to be created
3. Challenges to generate this methodology

While working on my current artwork, ‘Blooming Love’, I have been thinking about, working on, and learning about digital plants a lot. Knowledge I would like to share in this presentation.

Daniel Hengst (*1981 in Leipzig/Germany) is a Berlin-based media artist & his artworks
are often developed and presented in the framework of the performance arts. Since
2015, works in virtual reality, video- and sound-installations, sound performances,
artistic research projects and web projects have been created. The works deal with the
society-changing potential of technologies or/and taking non-human subjects into
account.

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Carly LAVE. The Golem-Labor: Researching Motion Capture Technology + Dance

Golem-Labor explores interdisciplinary and transnationally the interface of art and technology, man and machine, physical and virtual reality.
Dancers and choreographers work together with XR-artists and experts on research tasks and a performance. The results will flow into the next laboratories continuing in 2021. From this research, a virtual database of international movements will be created.
Golem-Labor emerged out of a predecessor transnational performance “Golem”. The dancework pioneered using motion capture technology to stage a dance live onstage and live in VR viewable from anywhere around the world. “Golem” was created by Carly LAVE in collaboration with gamelab.berlin of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Hochschule Kaiserslautern Virtual Design, Ghunghru Sounds, and supported by the U.S. Fulbright Program, Fulbright Commission Germany, Stanford University and private sponsors.
Golem-Labor is an international series of workshops organized by the Goethe-Institut that brings together contemporary dance and mixed reality technologies. The experiment started in autumn 2020 in Prague. More workshops will follow in 2021 – in Bogotá, Tel Aviv and Riga.
https://www.goethe.de/ins/cz/en/kul/the/gol.html

Energetic creative and analytical thinker with a passion for design, communication, and the arts. As both a data-driven and emotion-driven human, Carly Lave is fearless at finding new ways to make a positive impact in the world around us. (from Linked-in).

ART-SCIENCE-ENERGY KEYNOTE TALK

Douglas KAHN. On Not Seeing Blue: Energy And Materialism In Art And Science
Moderator Rasa SMITE

Douglas KAHN. On Not Seeing Blue: Energy And Materialism In Art And Science

Shimmer, a phenomenon in the paintings and rituals of the Yolngu, is now often used to describe paintings from other Aboriginal groups, and has been used in recent eco-feminist discourse. Although mostly positive, it can signal danger, “the flash of anger in the shark’s eye,” the eye-shine from reflective membrane (tapetum lucidum) behind the retina. This talk will focus on similar glints, flashes and fields at the liminality of luminosity, the energies held at thresholds, in two blues that cannot be seen, one in the sky, one in the retina. One occurs in the early days of quantum physics, surprisingly at the center art and science in European cultural theory, the other grows in significance now that seasons no longer synch with the circadian.

Douglas Kahn is author of Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts and Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, editor of Energies in the Arts, among other books in histories of the arts, experimental music, and computation in the arts. He is Honorary Professor at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and Professor Emeritus at University of California at Davis, and University of New South Wales.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 4A. (AI/ECO) INTELLIGENT ECOSYSTEMS
AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONDITIONS

Joyce HINTERDING / David HAINES / Alice BUCKNELL / Nina CZEGLEDY /
Sandra ALVARO
Moderator Rasa SMITE

Joyce HINTERDING, David HAINES. Wrangling Chaos
Alice BUCKNELL. The Martian Word for the World is Mother.
Nina CZEGLEDY. On Sensory Awareness
Sandra ALVARO. Aesthetics of Perception, a historical approximation to inhuman vision and its ecological meaning.

Joyce HINTERDING, David HAINES. Wrangling Chaos

On land of the Wiradjuri, the Dhurag, the Darkinjung and the Gundungurra. We walk between ancient aquifers, underground waterfalls going in the wrong direction, deep, water-worn slot canyons, ancient seabeds and encounter monstrous liquid ironstone forms. At around 1000 metres altitude in the rock formations of the north-western Blue Mountains, of NSW Australia ice-cold clear water is pushed to the level of this high plateau. Here we encounter the residues of phase-shifting matter. Iron in liquid form became ironstone caught in aquicludes and is now frozen in form and shape and leaving behind mysterious harmonic structures known as Pagodas. Unique in the world, the pagodas are identified by iconic weather-worn bladed dinner plates, named as such by any rock climber who has had to weave a delicate passage across them and the characteristic banding that recalls the beautiful periodic precipitation patterns found in the water processes of Liesegang chemistry. It may take extreme temperature, pressure, or energy, but all matter can be changed, and much of this landscape seems to retain the forms and shapes characteristic of the liquid phase.

David Haines lives and works in the Blue Mountains NSW. His practice spans a wide variety of media, from immersive installation and experimental audio for performance to discrete objects, images, and aroma compositions. He often collaborates with artist Joyce Hinterding and is renowned for producing technologically innovative works that combine extensive photographic and video fieldwork with 3d visualisation and real-time interactive 3d environments. David is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney and is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts

Joyce Hinterding lives and works in the Blue Mountains NSW, Australia. Her practice is internationally recognised for exploring acoustic and electromagnetic phenomena with custom-built field recording and monitoring technologies, including VLF antenna and experimental graphite drawings. She often collaborates with artist David Haines to produce large scale immersive video and real-time interactive 3d environments. Joyce is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney and lecturers at the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts.

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Alice BUCKNELL. The Martian Word for the World is Mother.

Merging science-fiction strategies, speculative biology, 3D worldbuilding, language AIs, and contemporary architectural proposals for space colonization, The Martian Word for World is Mother draws new links between a speculative society on the Red Planet and our own. The work uses the fantasy of an interplanetary future for humanity as an allegory to examine planetary systems here on Earth.

Loosely inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s classic science-fiction work, the Mars trilogy, the project uses a virtual Mars world built in the game engine Unreal Engine as a lab for exploring the social, technological, and ecological entanglements of three speculative Martian settlements with very different understandings of the Red Planet’s future, and who gets to decide.

Critiquing contemporary ideas of terraforming, or the geological and ecological transformation of Mars into a “Planet B” suitable for Earthly habitation and resource extraction, the project also draws an unlikely link between Mars and Scotland that spans science-fiction, sociology, etymology, and geology. One of the project’s settlements expands on the possibility of non-human life on Mars by merging mysticism, rewilding, and plant consciousness. Using data mapping of drone footage from the Scottish Highlands and a speculative Martian language that combines Scottish Gaelic and a Martian alphabet developed by 19th century French Mystic Helene Smith through a Natural Language Processor (NLP), a 3D rendition of the Highlands gleaned through drone data capturing becomes a site for glossolalic Martian flora that communicates with human agents through Martian-Gaelic glyphs.

In another settlement, a speculative metanational corporation loosely based around Silicon Valley BioTech companies attempts to develop a ‘bio-infrastructure’ base on Mars to mine water for a near-future Earth rapidly running out of resources necessary to sustain life. Meanwhile, in the final settlement, a 3D model of the first proposed Martian city Nüwa (announced in March 2021 and named after the mother goddess of Chinese mythology) and existent ‘Mars training camps’ in desert environments around the world are merged. This slow metamorphosis between real and rendered Martian settlements sets the stage for an experimental and multimedia narrative that dissolves the line between fact and (near-future) fiction.

More generative links between the Red Planet and our own blossomed before interplanetary settlement—and the hyper-masculine neoliberal politics underpinning it—became a near-future concern. The Martian Word for World is Mother reclaims the haptic space of Mars (and the Earth) as a site of entangled sympiosis and multispecies collaboration to envision more-than-human futures for Mars.

Project developed while in residence at RIXC, as part of the Goethe-Institut’s Generation A= AI residency, with support from the Garage Museum in Moscow.

Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer based in London. Working primarily through video game engines, her current work explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence. She uses speculative fiction and worldbuilding strategies to critique architecture’s role in the climate crisis and its contribution to systems of global inequality. In summer 2021, she organized New Mystics, a platform exploring interconnections of magic and technology through texts co-written with the Language AI GPT-3. She has exhibited her video work internationally, including the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, DAZ in Zürich, Ars Electronica with KÖNIG GALERIE, and White Cube in London, and her writing appears in titles including Flash Art, Frieze, and the Harvard Design Magazine. She studied Anthropology and Visual Art at the University of Chicago and Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art in London.

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Nina CZEGLEDY. On Sensory Awareness

The benefits of Nature on our sensorial being are well known, however it is important to remember that our attitude to, and representation of Nature is always closely linked to political, religious, environmental and social considerations. This includes the impact of radical changes due to the COVID 19 Pandemic affecting every aspect of our life counting our sensory awareness. The advent of the communication revolution contributed to a shift in our perceptions of sensory and spatial abilities. Furthermore in the Pandemic the notions of “private” or “public” space as we have formerly experienced it, have significantly altered affecting our sensory beings. The notion of the constitution of a sentient human being has also changed compelling a reconsideration of knowledge leading to a closer engagement with indigenous peoples. From time immemorial – in contrast to conventional compartmentalized Western worldviews – indigenous cultures across the world focus on a holistic understanding of Nature based on thousands of years of traditional experience. These concepts form an integral part of indigenous philosophy including the notions that everything is connected to everything else, everything including sensory experience is in a state of constant change and this change occurs in cycles or patterns. In Maori philosophy and heritage for example closely linked to and in many ways inseparable from environment: the spirit world of the ancestors is part and parcel of what we see, touch and feel, an integral place in the being of the natural world. In the Navajo universe every component moves continuously in an interrelated mode and the notion of time and space have distinctly different interpretations from those adopted since the Renaissance in “Western” cultures. Lately, “whole system” theories such as a worldview of interconnectedness and interdependence proposed by David Bohm, have found new currency. Bohm and Peat argued that scientific thinking in the last century favored an abstracted, fragmented approach to nature and sensory reality. They suggested a strong interconnection between space and sensory perception, stressing the importance of direct and instantaneous communication determinants and proposed a return to greater creativity and communication in the sciences. In conclusion among all the changes faced in the last century it remains undisputed that the advent of the all-pervasive communication revolution contributed to a fundamental shift in our sensory awareness.

Nina Czegledy, artist, curator, educator, works internationally on collaborative art, science & technology projects. The changing perception of the human body and its environment as well as paradigm shifts in the arts inform her projects. She has exhibited and published widely, won awards for her artwork and has initiated, lead and participated in workshops, forums and festivals worldwide at international events.

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Sandra ALVARO. Aesthetics of Perception, a historical approximation to inhuman vision and its ecological meaning.

Aesthetics is derived from the Greek term aisthetikos, meaning “aesthetics, sensitive, sentient, about sense perception”. First considered as the critic of taste [Baumgarten, 1750] aesthetics was enmeshed in a historical narrative that imposes a distinction between the cognitive-semantic and the affective-stimulant. This paper will sketch a different narrative in which perception is linked to knowledge. In this history, art is an experimental endeavour in which media are resurfaced as constitutive of our experience and always linked to situated histories and politics. Media digital or analogue links the viewer in networks of transindivituation that go beyond their organic limits [Stiegler, 2009, Colebrook, 2014].
This history starts in Modernity with Goethe’s experiments on the perception of colour that led into the avant-garde, this introduction will link with contemporary art and New Media. The possibility of interpretation and action always relies on a complex relationship between digital and analogue, or the capacity to reduce differential complexity to already established units of recognition [Bergson, 1912]. Artworks that process data implementing interfaces and ‘intelligent’ systems whit purposes other than efficiency, control or organic live maintenance engages us in complex ecologies that go beyond our organic limits and our milieu as a given system. This creative process opens our perception to a posthuman world, Gaia evolving indifferent to us [Margulis] and into the possibility of other futures.

Sandra Alvaro is PhD in Philosophy and an adjunct professor of Contemporary Art at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB). Among her research main areas are Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the Aesthetics and Politics of computational technologies; urbanism and posthumanism.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 4B. (SONIC1) SENSORY PERCEPTION
AND SONIC IMMERSIONS

Michelle LEWIS-KING / Kazuhiro JO, Roy TAMAKI, Takuya ISHIKAWA, Tomoya MATSUURA / Silvia ROSANI / Petros TATSIOPOULOS
Moderator Raivo KELOMEES

Michelle LEWIS-KING. Qiscapes: Listening to Cosmological Body
Kazuhiro JO, Roy TAMAKI, Takuya ISHIKAWA, Tomoya MATSUURA. Naku: The ‘primary’ of a voice in an anechoic chamber
Silvia ROSANI. AmotIon – emotional content to connect non-musicians to electroacoustic instruments
Petros TATSIOPOULOS. Computed Spatiality and non-Linearity, or the Virtuality of Sound

Michelle LEWIS-KING. Qiscapes: Listening to Cosmological Body

This presentation introduces Qiscapes 氣穴音景 (2019-), a cross-disciplinary research series that investigates complex inter-relationships between embodiment, the performance of medicine and cross-cultural approaches to science and technology. Drawing on my experience as an artist, acupuncturist and digital humanities scholar, I re-stage the Chinese medicine encounter within a digital performance context to create immersive spatial audio environments that form a co-resonant ‘healing’ relationality between peoples’ bodies and their environments. Qiscapes explores the contested existence of qi 氣. To do this, I created an instrument that sonically amplifies the process of acupuncture point location (qi anatomy) as well as the strength or weakness of ‘biosignals’ (or ‘qi’) that travel through each acu-point (qi physiology). The device is adapted from a clinical device into a medical-performance instrument that queries and materialises the existence of an intangible concept-material that many (especially western societies) believe is myth. The performances explore the meridian and point cartographies of human body (and animal bodies) from traditional Chinese medical texts in relation to the acupuncture point location and qi dynamics in real-time within the bodies of performance participants. As a result, each body reveals a bespoke ‘qi’ soundscape that materialises a nonmodern and transcultural vision of the body.

Drawing on experience as an artist, acupuncturist and scholar, Michelle Lewis-King’s research explores cosmological approaches to the embodied performance of medicine and technology in a globalised world. During her performances, Michelle repurposes premodern technologies and methods of the Chinese medicine encounter into contemporary tools that investigate humanist questions. Michelle often works collaboratively – current collaborators include: Atau Tanaka (Professor of Media Computing), Paul Oomen (Director of 4DSOUND) and Pierce Salguero (Professor of Asian History and Religious Studies). Michelle has performed at Ars Electronica, TodaysArt NL, etc., and at the V&A and Anatomy Museum, London, Ex Teresa Art Actual Museum Mexico. Her research is published in the Journal of Sonic Studies, The Acupuncturist, Digital Creativity and ELSE Journal of Artistic Research.

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Kazuhiro JO, Roy TAMAKI, Takuya ISHIKAWA, Tomoya MATSUURA. Naku: The ‘primary’ of a voice in an anechoic chamber

Naku is a performance with a rapper, Tamaki Roy, in an anechoic
chamber. An anechoic chamber is designed to absorb echoes, thus making it an echo-free space.

There is a tale in the space by John Cage.
“… heard two sounds, one high and one low. … (Cage, 1961).”
However, the tale seems doubtful. As Kahn noted, the anechoic chamber was the technological emblem of “Cagean” lore (Kahn, 1997).

To examine the tale, we focused on the ‘primary’ of a voice in
the rapper’s freestyle performance without any amplifications through microphones and speakers and reflections at the space.

Instead of “reading” a text in the performance, he directly extracted
a rap as a series of voices from his thought itself. As a result, we
observed two losses in sound: interference and dynamics. The absence of interference in sound (i.e., echoes) smoothens the rate of a rap that emanates directly from the rapper’s body. The disappearance of dynamics in sound (i.e., reflections) invalidates the need for a loud voice.

These made us aware that the oral creations in freestyle are not done only by the internal body functions of the subject (i.e., the rapper) but also adjusted by conflicts of the space of the performance.

KAZUHIRO, JO
Born in Fukushima in 1977. He is a practitioner with a background in acoustics and interaction design. He has been presenting his practices as works of art at museums and festivals as well as through publishing
papers in international journals and conferences about his projects.

TAMAKI, ROY
Born in Miyagi, Japan Prefecture in 1981. Lives and works in Tokyo. He released six music albums and performed at various music festivals in Japan and foreign countries. Additionally, he has created
performances, installations, film music, advertising music, picture books, etc. He also creates many collaborative works.
Website: https://www.tamakiroy.com/

TAKUYA, ISHIKAWA
Takuya Ishikawa is a practitioner with a background in design research. After working as UI/UX designer, he joined the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in 2013 and became an educator at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in 2016. Since 2020, he has been a full-time lecturer at the Kyoto University of Arts, Department of Information Design. He has been involved in the planning and production of music events, workshop, and cultural policy
research.

TOMOYA, MATSUURA
Tomoya Matsuura (Fukuoka, Japan) is a sound artist who builds systems that describe and generate sound. These take the form of music, sound installations, and instruments.
Website: https://matsuuratomoya.com/

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Silvia ROSANI. AmotIon – emotional content to connect non-musicians to electroacoustic instruments

Audio feedback seems to be very suitable to design and produce hybrid electroacoustic instruments, with which non-musicians could explore sound without the need for any previous knowledge of playing techniques or the western notation. Feedback can in fact result into very simple or extremely complex sounds, thus avoiding tonal references and sparing the sense of inadequateness to non-musicians. In AmotIon, the visitors’ voices are connected to some hybrid electroacoustic instruments through the emotion detection carried out live by a neural network model embedded in an app. The hybrid instruments imitates, contrasts or ignores the emotion detected in the sounds they hear. Their actions are determined by the history of their choices, like live performers would remember the strategies used during an improvisation. The sounds of the instruments are recorded and analysed, like the voices were, and the result of the analysis is compared to the emotional content of the voices. Emotion is a concept which many musicians deny to take into account while composing or performing. AmotIon seems to be able to objectively deal with a way to assess emotion in voices and instrumental sounds as well as the issue of accessibility and inequality in the field of music.’

Silvia Rosani studied composition at Mozarteum Universität after completing a 5-year degree in electronic engineering. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she has worked as Associate Lecturer. Her research focusses on the disruption of the boundaries between audience and performers through the use of visual elements and technology. Silvia investigates ways to create temporary less hierarchical communities within the performance space. Her music is performed internationally by ensembles such as Neue Vocalsolisten, and soloists such as pianist Anna D’Errico. Her work is performed at festivals such as Venice and Salzburg Biennale, MATA, ECLAT and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Silvia also performs with hybrid electroacoustic instruments she designs and produces. She was Fellow in residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Le Vivier, In Vitro Residency and at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction in Salzburg (Austria). In autumn 2020 Silvia was in a EASTN-DC residency at the ZKM to develop an installation with the IoTs and, in 2021, at the Center for New Media Culture in Riga (Latvia) through EMAP/EMARE and at the experimental Studio of the SWR in Freiburg (Germany). Silvia currently teaches Composizione Musicale Elettroacustica at the Conservatoire “Nicola Sala” (Benevento, Italy).

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Petros TATSIOPOULOS. Computed Spatiality and non-Linearity, or the Virtuality of Sound

Sound can have various harmonic contents and nonlinear content
seems to be the most sensory non-depriving. Additionally, spatiality
added with the same content immerses nonlinearity in space and sound
becomes immersive in any contemporary medium. As algorithmic composition
dictates an automated musical composition requires no predefined
sequence but only spectra that can form the productive medium of human music. Computer sound can only mediate as much as the input.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/123631503/sNOWFLAKES-vISUAL-RESEARCH-on-partials
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTAhXT1W_5QgEEBi1eOPvw
https://github.com/AMIMID/co-position

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Petros Tatsiopoulos, born 1993 in Athens, Greece is an Undergraduate student in the Visual Arts
Major department of ACG Deree. He has studied for two years in the Architecture BA department of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and three years in the Scenography and Exhibition Design department of the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe Germany. During his studies, he has completed one internship in sculpture and one in theater scenography.
Tatsiopoulos is an installation artist, media artist, painter, sound artist, and sculptor. His work is
about dimensionality, non-dimensionality, temporality, the virtuality of sound, and intermediality. Sometimes he works without a concrete medium for the sake of exploration. Apart from studying, Tatsiopoulos has been a sculptor assistant since 2015 and has been a member of the artist group Sushila Maloy stationed in Karlsruhe that created a one-year residency and exhibition space, funded by the group’s activities and the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. In 2016 he designed the spatial environment for the lyric theater play Urban Prayers written by Bjoern Bicker and performed by religious citizens, in the Baden State Theater, Germany, among other scenographic works at that time. In 2015 he took part in the spatial sound art conference and exhibition InSonic, in Karlsruhe, Germany, as a student of HfG.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 5A. (SONIC2) SENSORY PERCEPTION
AND SONIC IMMERSIONS

Juan DUARTE / MOON Martina ZELENIKA / Gabriela MUNGUÍA, Guadalupe CHÁVEZ / Vygintas ORLOVAS
Moderator Solvita ZARINA

Juan DUARTE. How computers learn to deep listen
MOON Martina ZELENIKA. The body as a musical instrument: generating data into audio-visual content
Gabriela MUNGUÍA, Guadalupe CHÁVEZ. Rhizospheric Territories: Expressions from the porosities of the soils (Mexico)
Vygintas ORLOVAS. Sound analysis by schlieren flow visualization

Juan DUARTE. How computers learn to deep listen

The notion of deep listening by Pauline Oliveros brings a method for “attuning” humans to their sonic environments, that is to say, expanding the perception of sounds to include the whole space and time continuum of sound. This method proves to be helpful for musicians to improvise with their surroundings, expanding human sensory beyond the short-term act of hearing. Still, listening is a complex practice, an actual and conceptual pursuit that augments the way we see the world (Voegelin, 2014). With this in mind, listening to sonic environments demands attention to what is perceived acoustically and cognitively, since sound carries intelligence: ideas, feelings, and memories which are triggered by sound (Oliveros, 2005). In addition, deep listening sound work also experimented with sound technologies to enhance listening to the environment at both micro and macro-level (Kahn, 2013), so that attuning to sonic environments went beyond human-scale environments.

Sounds from nature became perceivable through amplification technologies that made them audible, such as the phono-autograph (Sterne, 2003). In recent years, artistic experimentation emerged (Beloff, 2020) along with scientific development of augmented listening devices to enhance impaired human hearing (Corey & Singer, 2021). This way, Art and Science approach could reveal a novel sensorium from environmental listening. Retrospectively, a multitude of technologies fundamentally transformed our sonic environment, human settlements merged with nature and technology, similar to the notion of “techno-sphere and techno-ecology”(Haff and Hörl, 2015). In this way, Environmental Computing (Gabrys, 2016) is a hybrid practice for sensing our planet with computing systems coordinated by artificial intelligence (AI). Experimenting with environmental computing sound could update the notion of deep listening, for that is necessary to ask: how to devise technologies that deep listen. Determined by this idea, the present doctoral research proposes experimenting with computing systems that execute deep listening methods, exploring machine sensing and cognition for augmenting human listening of the environment.

Juan Duarte Regino is a Mexican-born artist-researcher based in Finland working with environmental sound, exploring the entanglements between nature and technology. He creates artifacts and instruments that resonate with planetary energies and ancient cosmologies. His research explores augmented listening of environments, combining AI and remote sensing techniques, to explore how computers can learn to deep-listen to expand human sensory. This proposal redefines computing technologies from a manifold worldview. His sound artwork and creative technology include lectures, workshops, and performances in Europe, Asia, and Mexico. He holds a MA degree in New Media from Aalto University and a BA degree in Audiovisual Communication from Cloister de Sor Juana. He was a visiting researcher in IAMAS, in Japan, a grantee of the National Endowment of Arts in Mexico, and the Arts Promotion Center Finland.

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MOON Martina ZELENIKA. The body as a musical instrument: generating data into audio-visual content

In this paper, I set out the basis of my interactive practices of perception and sound immersive performance; RECEPTILIUM (2018) is a hi-tech audiovisual interactive performance act in which the human body and neurofield are used as a communication medium or a musical instrument that produces audio content – music when performing meditative drawing that shapes a single point attractor or a complex attractor according to Jung’s theory of chaos. In my work, I am focused on emotionally positive attractors. Viewers have the opportunity to meditate and attend to the creation of a visual artwork while experiencing deep listening of sonyfied data as a result of the creation process. During the performance, my brain waves followed by EEG and physical motion/gesture data from my both hands are transmitted and converted into sounds that together form an ambient audio record connected to real-time generative visual projected onto a wall/holo screen. The purpose of this act is, to invite the audience to meditate altogether, to tap into the energy of the cosmos, because God created an ordered universe out of chaos. Only then can we unite and rise above the challenges confronting humanity today. Listening is the exercise of the auditory and deeper senses. By perceiving different sounds, especially the practice of deep listening, subconsciously influences the development of empathy. The interactive immersive performance RECEPTILIUM is designed to take into account the multisensory nature of the experience in which they are engaged; sound, sight, focus, physical condition, touch, balance, harmony, and structure of sound/music and rhythm.

The interdisciplinary artist MOON Martina Zelenika (1978, Croatia) uses innovative methods and different media in the creation of artworks, combining traditional techniques and the latest digital technologies.
The main motif and theme of her artistic work is “freedom” in the time of posthumanism, inspired by the source of light (God), the cosmos, and language. Come, look high and deep, above and in between.
Martina graduated in 2001 from the Printmaking Department of the Academy of Fine Arts of the University Zagreb and took a master’s in 2006 in the area of Video and New-media at the Academy of Visual Art and Design of Ljubljana University. She has been awarded more than 14 well-regarded grants and several scholarships and has participated at international conferences dedicated to digital and multimedia art. She has more than 17 solo exhibitions and participated at new media festivals, and international exhibitions in Austria, South Korea, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, Latvia, etc. The artist MOON Martina Zelenika is a member of the ADA-the Archive of Digital Art – database of virtual art, and SALOON – Network for Women of Berlin’s art scene in 2020. She lives and works in Zagreb.

RECEPTILIUM

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Gabriela MUNGUÍA, Guadalupe CHÁVEZ. Rhizospheric Territories: Expressions from the porosities of the soils (Mexico)

The way in which nature has shaped such a wide spectrum of representations lies in its great universality. It encompasses everything, while it survives through the world of culture. The different ecological, political, social and cultural crises, toxicities and vulnerabilities lead us to renounce nature as a static, beautiful, inert, passive and distant ontology. In this text, the rhizospheric territories are woven with their materialities and lifeforms to bind poetics and other stories that tension the human exceptionality and the construction of knowledge about the world, often cultured by binary, extractive and violent representations. These porous, wet, dark and borderless territories are also affective political spaces for negotiating and building new alliances. Healing the soils is an urgent mission against time in these moments of emergency. For this reason, working to align our cultural, economic and political imaginaries in synergy with the ground, the plants, the microbiota and their ability to vitalize and regulate the CO2 uptake and fixation, is a fundamental task to face the planetary challenges of the future. Thus, like an anarchaeological journey, this text becomes entangled with the restless beings and forms that make up the soils. Through the dismantling of the rhizospheric territories, its imaginaries, lifeforms, materialities and viscosities, the work of Electrobiota Collective embraces the importance of transdisciplinary thought and artistic practice as an effort to align the cultural sphere with the environmental crisis embodying the soils in an amorphous story that invites the others to destabilize present and future genealogies about the living, matter and the time beyond the human.

Multi-species collective founded in 2014 by mexican transmedia artists Gabriela Munguía and Guadalupe Chávez. Through the indiscipline of electronic arts, bio-art, environmental humanities, cultural biology and southern epistemologies, they investigate possible rhizospheric interspecies communication. They coordinate the Rhizospheric Laboratory, an experimental education project focused on ecology of soils, art and open technologies. Their artwork has been presented in different international festivals such as the Kosice Biennial (Ar); the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of South America (Ar-Br); Transpiksel Festival (Mx); Piksel Festival Art, Science and Free Technology (No); Teheran Annual Digital Art Festival (Ir); Cairotronica Festival of New Media Art of Cairo (Eg), Transitios MX Festival Internacional de Artes Electrónicas y Video (Mx), ECOSS, Biotecnología, Arte y Transfeminismo (Es), among others. Her work has received several international and national awards.

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Vygintas ORLOVAS. Sound analysis by schlieren flow visualization

Schlieren flow visualization is a method often used in aerodynamics, however, if a sensitive enough setup is used it can help to analyze sound and its propagation as well.
In a collaboration with “Sigma Koki” (Japan) I was able to put this idea in a test environment and prove it in their lab.
I have used a synthesizer I have created in pure data to recreate various waveshapes and frequencies of sound and created visual documentation of how they propagate in gas using the schlieren system.
I believe that seeing rather than drawing based on data helps us understand the phenomena that are constantly evolving in the environment around us due to the slightest pressure changes. Seeing how sounds flow in the air is a non-verbal experience that helps us better understand sound as a phenomenon.

Dr. Vygintas Orlovas, born in 1989 in Kaunas, Lithuania, is an artist and researcher working in both the visual and audible art and focusing on the relations and connections of these two fields.
Vygintas is taking part in art exhibitions since 2009, in conferences since 2014, started teaching at Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2015 and has earned his doctoral degree in arts in 2019.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 5B. AI & XR. EMBODIED EXPERIENCES
AND EXTENDED REALITY

Marina HASSAPOPOULOU / Ilva SKULTE / Claire BREACH / Roc PARÉS
Moderator Oksana CHEPELYK

Marina HASSAPOPOULOU. Artificial Intelligence and Post-Human Embodied Experience
Ance JANEVICA. Experimental walk: A walk through communicating ecological complexity and immersive experiences
Ilva SKULTE. Poetry reading as an embodied practice – interplay of senses and meaning of text
Claire BREACH. Peanut Head Enters
Roc PARÉS. “BHDD”. An immersive art installation that enables participants to experience their own beheading

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Marina HASSAPOPOULOU. Artificial Intelligence and Post-Human Embodied Experience

While there is much focus on AI from a Science and Technology perspective, the contributions of AI to the Arts and Humanities have not yet been fully explored. The AI artists included in my presentation (Toni Dove, Paul Vanouse, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and others) provide a strong historical context for embodied, gendered, economic, racial, and socially-engaged AI practice, as a counterpoint to the often problematically disembodied, post-racialised and universalised notions of AI. The interactive, performative, and ephemeral aspects of creative AI media practices –along with the fact that they are often difficult to access, archive, emulate and/or remediate– have resulted in a significant deficit in historical and critical attention. Although these works can be considered relatively recent, most of the technology they use (including hardware, software, and prosthetics) has already been eclipsed by newer technologies. Thus, these works not only run the risk of becoming technologically obsolete, but also becoming historically forgotten due to their general inaccessibility. For this reason, my presentation includes an analytical overview of the preservation and access resources I have created (including ExpressiveAI.net) alongside my research, to more widely disseminate these pioneering expressive AI experiments that make important contributions (and complications) to the study of AI.
ExpressiveAI.net is a new creative AI initiative I have launched, in collaboration with Da Ye Kim and the University of Cambridge.

Marina Hassapopoulou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and NYU Humanities Fellow, and has served as Associate Co-Director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, at New York University. She has published articles on topics including interactive cinema, digital spectatorship, experimental and Hollywood cinema, fan studies, representations of Hellenism in U.S. media, hybrid pedagogy, expanded television, and the Digital Humanities. She teaches film, theory/philosophy, digital media, European cinema, Digital Humanities, and theory-practice courses. She is currently working on her book project, Interactive Cinema: The Ethics of Participation in the Era of (Dis)Connection.

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Ance JANEVICA. Experimental walk: A walk through communicating ecological complexity and immersive experiences

Experimental walk is a collection of 4 essays exploring how the climate crisis currently and historically is communicated, how this relates to a missing urgency and even the denial of climate change, and how new technologies with the promise of an ancient story telling technique might be a solution. In each of the essays one aspect will be highlighted. I start by investigating communication strategies by both supporters and opposition of climate regulation. The second essay will explore what the Anthropocene is and our role as humanity. Then we move onto how the Anthropocene mindset relates to perspective. I discuss the invention of perspective and how ‘looking from a different perspective’ are both important in tackling the issues of Anthropocene mindset. Lastly, I look into the opportunities that new technologies give us to create immersive experiences in order to let us look at complex topics from different perspectives, resulting in a closer connection and therefore, hopefully, a sense of engagement.

Ance Janevica, born in Rīga 1995, is a designer of storytelling objects and experiences. She translates in-depth research into meaningful narratives and experiences.
Ance is a strong believer of critical and speculative design as a necessary tool to tackle complexity and the wicked problems of this age. She graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven with the projects Pollination Equipment and House of Disinformation. Previous education includes photography, textiles, and classical arts. Currently pursuing a postgraduate degree at Royal College of Art in Information Experience Design. Her dissertation – Experimental walk: A walk through communicating ecological complexity and immersive experiences, has been awarded a Distinction. The current research focuses on exploring perspective alterations as a tool to better understand crucial dilemmas of this age.

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Ilva SKULTE. Poetry reading as an embodied practice – interplay of senses and meaning of text

Rapid development of media technologies has pushed forward research on multimodality of texts – saved in and communicated by help of those media – and uses of senses in the process of perception. If the text of a poem is accessible for reading/writing/listening in different media and environments, how can the identity of a poem be described and how is the meaning of the poem constructed as a result of an embodied process of cognition? The proposed paper will discuss theoretical aspects of embodied multisensory reading of poetry using examples from Latvian scene of artistic experimentation.

Ilva Skulte, Dr. Philol., Assoc. Prof. has a doctoral degree in the history of language from the University of Latvia. Since 2001, she has been working at the Department of Communication at Riga Stradins University, Latvia, and for the last years as a Director of the Masters Programme for Communication and Media Studies. Having taught and written about history of media and reflecting the changes in culture caused by new media she discovered the importance of media literacies (including visual literacies) and arts. She has also worked as a cultural journalist since 2000.

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Claire BREACH. Peanut Head Enters

The film PEANUT-HEAD ENTERS [2021] by Claire Breach who works under the pseudonym Rhubarcode, features Rhubarcode’s mascot, Peanut-Head. Peanut-Head has two forms: virtual, as “Peanut-Head 1.0” and material, as “Peanut-Head 2.0”.
Peanut-Head 1.0 is a digital avatar constructed from primitive shapes partly inspired by imagery associated with 90’s rave flyers and Y2K graphics. In the style of this imagery and cartoon characters by extension, it was a vessel, carrying the suggestion of embodiment. While cartoon characters are typically exaggerations of expression, Peanut-Head’s blank face encouraged viewers to project their own emotion onto it.
This avatar’s initial function was to attend underground music events that had shifted to online spaces during the pandemic. These events were largely attended by anime-inspired avatars living their cybergoth sexual fantasies to the fullest while Peanut-Head would dance clunkily alongside them.
When the events finished, Peanut-Head 1.0 continued to roam the wider metaverse, searching for meaningful moments in the virtual playground. The film shows Peanut-Head exploring empty worlds in virtual reality, engaging with bouncy castles, mirrors and even a gun, causing the demise of Peanut-Head 1.0.
The second birth of Peanut-Head (2.0), took place IRL. It emerged as a mascot constructed out of foam as it was decided that Peanut-Head 1.0 was to be cut loose from its digital form to expand its interface with the physical world and experience its offerings. Peanut-Head 2.0 continued its stream of interactions with objects and activities, such as boogie boarding and roller skating among countless other possibilities.
Peanut-Head 2.0, whilst a beacon of optimism, got battered by the sea while boogie boarding. The mascot became waterlogged, sunken and sandy. It became very heavy and sank from the weight of its own materiality.
Even in its sunken state, Peanut-Head still succeeded in making people smile and laugh; it’s cracked paint exposing a kind of beauty.
Now, in this bittersweet way,
I like to think
Maybe Peanut-Head is wandering around heaven?
On a big peanut in the sky.

CLAIRE BREACH
I want to find meaning in the meaningless. I avoid starting art with set intentions of conveying particular meanings because complex meanings can be derived from just about everything, which I want to draw out like an animal from its den. My process mostly consists of paying attention to vague trivial things floating around my subconscious. I give these ideas shape and allow room for unexpected things, even mistakes, to occur while following these trains of thoughts as the act of making unfolds. Animals and food are recurring topics as they can both come under the category of triviality but generate visceral, sometimes contradictory responses in us. I want to cultivate these tricky emotions and in-between definitions. A sense of knowing “you don’t have to take it seriously” is something I want to reflect upon with earnest intent.
I aim to exploit intricate, technical methods of art-making for intuitive and democratising means. Characters and shapes are dissociated from their original purpose, by which the systems in which they typically function are exposed. My influences are always changing and consist of too many things to list but I am inspired by Frank Sidebottom as well as the naïve clunkiness brought about by the technical limitations of early CGI.

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Roc PARÉS. “BHDD”. An immersive art installation that enables participants to experience their own beheading

“BHDD” is an immersive art installation that enables participants to experience their own beheading. Above and beyond the violence of this statement, “BHDD” is an experimental research project that aims to deconstruct digital subjectivation processes and to critically examine how they mediate human experience in interactive audiovisual environments. The underlying principle of this installation is that of binocular rivalry, a phenomenon whereby alternations occur between the stimuli of the right eye and the left eye, making it difficult for the viewer to have a full and coherent vision of their own execution. The installation is activated each time a viewer climbs up onto the scaffold and looks through the stereoscope above the execution block. One sees the executioner—pre-filmed in situ—with one eye, and one sees oneself—live, via a closed-circuit camera—with the other eye. The viewer’s mind strives to merge the two images into a single one, but when the executioner brandishes the axe, the viewer’s survival instinct kicks in and their conscious awareness is drawn exclusively to the eye that detects the threat. The installation triggers the viewer to question the limits of what can be experienced through of our lived bodies and the limits of what can be experienced through a virtual and remote self.

Roc Parés is an interactive communication artist and researcher of the DigiDoc Group, attached to the Department of Communication of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Barcelona.
In his 30-year career, Parés has collaborated with dozens of artists, scientists, engineers, institutions and collectives with whom he has created pioneering platforms in electronic art, including Galeria Virtual (Museum of Science, 1993-1995, and Pompeu Fabra University-UPF, 1995-2000), devoted to the development of virtual reality as an art form; MACBA en línia (MACBA+UPF, 1995-1997), devoted to net.art; M.A.L. (HANGAR+MOB European Commission, 2011-2013), devoted to smartphone art; or the Master’s Degree in Digital Arts of the UPF (1995- 2015), of which he was co-director from 2010 to 2015. Parés has been one of the promoters of the CAiRE (Art and Experimental Research Cluster) (UPF, UOC, UAB, HANGAR and UB).

Parallel Sessions / Panel 6A. (SONIC3) SENSORY PERCEPTION
AND SONIC IMMERSIONS

Lauren RUIZ / Stephanie ROTHENBERG, Suzanne THORPE / Kathryn BLAIR, Pil HANSEN, Lora OEHLBERG / Gundega STRAUTMANE / Ricardo Dal FARRA
Moderator Solvita ZARINA

Lauren RUIZ. Our Watchmen are Blind: An interrogation of Subterranean Labor
Stephanie ROTHENBERG, Suzanne THORPE. Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling
Kathryn BLAIR, Pil HANSEN, Lora OEHLBERG. Algorithmic Rituals: Embodied Explorations of Algorithmic Decision-Making
Gundega STRAUTMANE. Artistic Experiments with Artificial Languages
Ricardo Dal FARRA. Collective experiences of extended reality: The Understanding Visual Music – UVM project.

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Lauren RUIZ. Our Watchmen are Blind: An interrogation of Subterranean Labor

Invaders can be quiet, slow, unmeasured and unassuming. Invaders can consume and transform a landscape in an uncharted land. The most commonly known earthworms in North America, eisenia fetida and lumbricus terrestris, also known as red wigglers and nightcrawlers respectively, arrived with the first wave of European settlers burrowed inside potted plants and sacks of spoiled crops. These annelids, unaware of their ability to engineer ecologies as they traveled alongside their human counterparts as resources of free labor, now play a vital role in the complex systems of soil health and water treatment as humans confront the effects of micro- and nanoplastics and the resulting toxicants that cycle through soil, water, and animal bodies.
As a method for understanding the complex relationships between human and annelids, I am conducting a research-based multimedia project to discover the connections between animal labor, eco-colonialism and the rapid invasion of nanoplastics into our water, soil, and bodies. This paper will unpack my ongoing developments as well as my partnership with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County which unearthed more inquiries regarding soil health, the role of earthworms in local ecology, and the historical agricultural practices and belief systems that create the groundwork for industrial agriculture both locally and on a national scale. In addition to this research, I will discuss my recent digital works and multimedia projects including “Zone of Loss,” which features a multichannel audio experience of earthworms sounds with dwarfing sculptural elements to immense the viewer in an atmosphere of the subterranean.

Lauren Ruiz is a research based multimedia artist interrogating ecological contamination, institutional authority, and bioethics through speculative-fiction-based installations, interactive performance, and digital works. Her work calls attention to the direct effects of individual choices on the environment and the future of human existence amidst anthropogenic climate change.
Ruiz draws upon environmental data and science journals, climate fiction novels and horror films. Her interactive installations situate viewers in recognizable institutional spaces, affecting how they relate to the complex mechanisms of evolution, ecology, data, and identity relative to institutional power and personal embodiment.

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Stephanie ROTHENBERG, Suzanne THORPE. Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling

For our talk we will discuss our project “Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling,” a speculative operetta focused on the listening body of the heroic oyster. A water filter, sea level mitigator and food source, the oyster is a vital member of our ecosystem that knows habitats for settlement by sensing sound. Specifically, research conducted at North Carolina State University’s Department of Marine, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences found that the bottom-dwelling oyster knows suitable settlement habitats through a distinction of sound signatures in underwater soundscapes. For oysters, sound is a more reliable indicator than chemical exudates or patterns of light. Building on soundscape studies that feature the listening body as an onto-epistemological site, we will discuss how our project leverages data of harbor port movement to query the dynamic relationships between human activity and the wellbeing of oysters. Through the simulated sense of this sonically navigating being, in an immersive sound, visual and sculpted environment, we ask what does a safe harbor sound like? How do we tend to an oyster and how does it tend to us? And can the listening oyster guide us to a politics of mutual tending?

Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces her work investigates the power dynamics of techno utopias, global economics and outsourced labor. She has exhibited internationally including Eyebeam (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (US), House of Electronic Arts / HeK (CH), LABoral (ES), Transmediale (DE), and ZKM Center for Art & Media (DE). Residencies include ZK/U in Berlin, TOKAS / Tokyo Art and Space, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace and Eyebeam in NYC. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum, Artnet, Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic.

Suzanne Thorpe is an artist-scholar whose creative research intersects electronic music, feminist and ecological theory. Her work, which she composes and performs with a variety of media and technology, has been presented internationally. Weaving together traditional and creative research methods she studies past and present music-making sites as critical frameworks that animate social and political concerns and resist hierarchical social organization, normative identity articulation and material separation. Thorpe, who holds an MFA in Electronic Music & Media from Mills College, a Ph.D. in Integrative Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and is a Deep Listening instructor, having studied in depth with American composer and Deep Listening founder Pauline Oliveros, is currently a member of the Society of Fellows and a Mellon Teaching Fellow at Columbia University.

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Kathryn BLAIR, Pil HANSEN, Lora OEHLBERG. Algorithmic Rituals: Embodied Explorations of Algorithmic Decision-Making

We present Algorithmic Rituals, a facilitated art experience in which visitors create collaborative movement-based “rituals” to reflect on their technology use habits. To their movement, attendees layered in rules about how to relate their movements to that of other attendees. The goal of the experience is to provide an embodied way for attendees to explore technosocial issues around algorithmic decision making and habitual technology use and discuss them in an open, facilitated context.The embodiment aspect provides a dedicated space for reflection and relation to others. We describe the development and final form of the experience, including adaptations for the COVID-19 pandemic: using Zoom to mediate the experience. We present reflections from interviews with Algorithmic Rituals participants, contributing a unique perspective on creating experiences about the social and relational impacts of technology. This perspective is particularly relevant to embodied experiences mediated by technology.

Kathryn Blair is a PhD candidate in the Computational Media Design program at the University of Calgary. She completed her Master of Fine Arts there in 2018. Her work provides contexts in which people can explore the way our societies use algorithmic decision-making. She also creates wearable pieces exploring the relationship between the body and technology, and can often be caught scheming about how to hack things to be controlled by EEG headsets or soldering into the dead of night. She has been involved in the Calgary-based tech couture fashion show Make Fashion since 2013, and has shown her work in Alberta, British Columbia, China, the United States and Ireland.

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Gundega STRAUTMANE. Artistic Experiments with Artificial Languages

My research is offered as an original and substantial contribution to the fields of knowledge of new media arts and creative practice, and to the cognate fields of art history, art theory and art curation. The research focuses specifically on linguistic text codifications as a deliberate process inherent in certain visual artworks, and combines a survey of primary and secondary literature with a practice-led approach in which new digital artworks are created and analysed. The theories of Ferdinand De Saussure underpin the research in regard of ideas on structure in language, in particular the concept of the bilateral (two-sided) sign.
Several main areas of innovation are detailed in the research. Firstly, the identification of contemporary artworks that use the processes of codification and/or transcodification, combined with the exploration of self-created artworks that utilise such processes, with the aim of developing a framework that enables the characteristics of such artworks to be classified. Secondly, a detailed investigation of the processes involved in the artistic interpretation of linguistic code generation and/or new language creation; and thirdly, research into historical writing systems from different cultures worldwide which provide a rich source from which to inspire artists to create new language codes which could be embodied in artworks.

Gundega Strautmane is a Latvian artist, born in1987 in Ogre, Latvia. She is a PhD student in Liepāja University, department of New Media Art. Her research title is “Codification Art: Artistic Experimentation with Imaginary Languages and Codes”. For the last fifteen years, the artist has been working with art projects in the field of visual and haptic poetry. In her earlier projects, Gundega makes use of Braille code and creates works that are perceivable for both the viewers with good eyesight and also visually impaired people. In her latest projects artist continues with her imaginary language compositions in the new media art field.
For the last ten years, Strautmane has been working in different art schools as a teacher of computer graphics. From 2014 until 2018 in Art Academy of Latvia, Latgale branch as a head of the Department of Textile Art department and computer graphic lecturer in Department of Graphic art. Form 2021 Gundega Strautmane is working as a computer graphic lecturer in Latvia University, Department of Art and Technologies. Previously Gundega has studied textile art at the Experimental Textile Design Institute in Berlin Art University, the Art Academy of Latvia and Riga Technical University.

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Ricardo Dal FARRA. Collective experiences of extended reality: The Understanding Visual Music – UVM project.

Increasingly, today’s collective immersive experiences focus on a kind of extended reality in which we coexist with presentiality and virtuality. The audience, in a planetarium, surrounded by multiple projections on the dome and multi-channel audio, can simultaneously perceive the richness and depth of images in space, as well as the movement and distribution of sounds and music at different distances and travelling along different paths, while being able to maintain contact with their surroundings and even touch people nearby. This can produce a state of reality, or awareness, that reaches surprising dimensions when interwoven with certain artistic expressions.

The project “Understanding Visual Music – UVM” explores these possibilities through collective experiences, investigating ways to enrich the encounter between art, science, and emerging technologies, offering immersive environments that lead our senses to explore new territories.

References:
– Smirnov, A. (2013) Sound in Z. Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia. Koenig Books. Inglaterra.
– Understanding Visual Music – UVM. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/UVMvisualmusic

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Dr. Dal Farra is professor of electronic arts and music at Concordia University, Canada and director of the electronic arts research centre CEIARTE-UNTREF, Argentina. He is Founder of the international symposia Balance-Unbalance (BunB) and Understanding Visual Music (UVM). Dal Farra has been director of Hexagram in Canada, coordinator of the Multimedia Communication national program of the Federal Ministry of Education in Argentina, and researcher of UNESCO, France, for its project Digi-Arts. He designed university and high school programs on art-science. Ricardo created the Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection hosted by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Canada. He is a board member of ISEA International. Dal Farra is a composer and artist specialized in transdisciplinary actions with science and emergent technologies.

Parallel Sessions / Panel 6B. (GREEN) ECOLOGIES BEYOND GREEN. LIGHT, ENERGIES AND FIELDS

Richard LOWENBERG / Taylor HOKANSON, Kay DARTT, J. Stephen LEE / Danielle DAMICO / Raphael ARAR, Olivia ARAR / Veronika SELLNER
Moderator Daniel HENGST

Richard LOWENBERG. “Info/Eco: Interferences & Resonances – The Nature of Information”
Taylor HOKANSON, Kay DARTT, J. Stephen LEE. Fine With This: An Internet Controlled Flaming Sculpture
Danielle DAMICO. The Sky is Coming
Raphael ARAR, Olivia ARAR. Food Carbon Footprint Index (FCF)
Veronika SELLNER. Redesigning Ecosystems: Synthetic Biology, Art and the Non-Human

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Richard LOWENBERG. “Info/Eco: Interferences & Resonances – The Nature of Information”

“Interferences & Resonances” is an eco-sensing arts installation, currently being developed to sense, process and display selected low frequency eco-signals photonically, not electronically, demonstrating laser interferometry, the technique used to create holograms and to detect gravitational waves.
Real-time data from multiple remote and on-site sources (Schumann resonances, plant signals, human brainwaves, tides, financial market fluctuations, and Earth climate/temperature changes) will concurrently be processed, visualized, sonified and presented in an installation focused on differences that make a difference, to enhance our sense of light, of life and of enlightenment.
Light has been an elemental medium since first humans saw the sun. Fast forward. We are now teetering on a precipice that could lead to a long fall. Our near-magical contemporary scientific and technological progress is evolving concurrently with co-evolutionary ecological imbalances, bringing into question the very nature of humanity.
Being is not digital. An emergent photonic era is now upon us, portending new ways of thinking, beyond digital, to a new analogue with a quantum twist. Photonics brings us to new ways of understanding that are not simply on-off, if-than, either-or, 1-0; requiring us to think differently; to take next steps towards an ecology of mind. Light can illuminate the way.

Richard Lowenberg, (Haifa, 1946) is a planner/designer, artist and eco-cultural activist, dedicating his creative life to understandings and creative realization of works setting examples for ‘an ecology of the information environment’, and resulting opportunities for development of a ‘cultural economy’.
Richard is founding director, 1st-Mile Institute and a director of the Telluride Institute, currently stewarding a “Networking for Mountain Sustainability” initiative for the UN.
Richard studied and taught at Pratt Institute, initiating its Electronic Media Arts program in 1971, and was one of the founding team of the Kitchen in NYC that year. He taught TechnoCulture Studies at UC Davis and was Artist-in-Bioregional Residence there, 1997-2006. His interdisciplinary design, media arts, installation, performance and art/science works have been presented internationally.

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Taylor HOKANSON, Kay DARTT, J. Stephen LEE. Fine With This: An Internet Controlled Flaming Sculpture

Inspired in equal measure by meme culture and global calamity, Fine With This is a monumental, cast iron sculpture that is perpetually aflame. Audience members viewing the piece over streaming video can command it to shoot bursts of fire via web chat. Indeed, the work is designed to be experienced both physically and virtually, promoting a conversation about armchair activism and the ways in which internet culture can have a concrete impact on real world events (e.g. pizzagate, the Capitol insurrection, and r/wallstreetbets). A live demonstration of the work will be paired with a question and answer session detailing the hardware and software that enable its function.

Kay Dartt is a sculptor with an interdisciplinary practice that combines craft, design, engineering, and philosophy. The work she makes reflects how consumer behavior in western cultures is forcing an imbalance between the natural, artificial and virtual environments we interact with. Her aesthetics synthesizes biomorphic forms, consumer language and parametric design elements. Through this work she challenges cultural philosophies of living by creating functional sculptures that exaggerate issues of environmental imbalance.
No material or processes is restricted in Kay’s practice, but she is always engaged with metal casting. This passion for craft is fueled by the intrinsic nature of iron and engagement with the iron casting community. Currently she uses her practice to foster socially minded innovators and collaboratively fabricate objects that generate dialogue about current issues.

Taylor Hokanson is an Associate Professor of Art at Columbia College Chicago. Hokanson’s creative practice problematizes the social and technological systems we take for granted, by creating artwork that employs functionality and absurdity to explore an uncertain future. He has exhibited at Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and Techfest Mumbai, and can also be found on new media platforms like Github, LinkedIn Learning, and the Opposable Thumbs podcast, which he co-hosts.

Stephen Lee is a designer and educator with experience in brand, motion, and interactive design. Past clients include AT&T, Gatorade, Google, IBM, and Nike. He has taught at a number of institutions both within the United States and abroad in India, Mexico, Spain, and Peru. He received an MFA in Graphic Design and Integrated Media from CalArts. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University. His research focuses on incorporating XR (extended reality) and other creative technology into a contemporary design practice.

Danielle DAMICO. The Sky is Coming

THE SKY IS COMING is a multisensory two-channel projection installation that depicts an ecosexual encounter between a developing thunderstorm and its human lover. Two rectangular channels are projected adjacent from and pressed against each other in a dark space. Astroturf is laid out on the floor in front of the projection and the audience is welcomed to sit or stand on the synthetic simulacrum. Atop a pedestal is a perfume bottle filled with a distillation of Bradford Pear tree blossoms and a small stack of sample cards. Visitors are encouraged to spray the perfume onto a sample card or their skin.

My human character is a fulgarophilic – someone who is sexually aroused by thunderstorms. Ecosexuality refers to intersections between sexology and ecology though it is popularly used to describe humans who engage in sexual or sensual relations with elements of the earth. The ecosexual movement utilizes an intersectional approach that breaks down the intimidating guise of mainstream environmentalism and allows for people to come together to celebrate and connect with the earth in a way that emphasizes community building and reciprocity.

The ecosexual movement is included in queer ecological scholarship which examines how humans are included in (not separate from) a natural world and its systems that are ever changing as the result of social and historical influences. The Bradford Pear tree is a hybrid that was created by scientists in Prince George’s County, Maryland in the late 1950s. Envisioned as a decorative, durable tree that could survive various conditions, it was planted all across America starting in the 1960s. Today, the Bradford Pear is considered an invasive species. The root structures of the clones choke out nearby native plants and the supposedly “sterile” trees can reproduce through cross-pollination. The scent of the Bradford Pear tree is popularly associated with the scent of human ejaculate and thus I’ve used them as a metaphor for how we sensually engage our environment.

The two channel film concludes with a ‘facial’ which is a euphemism for the act of ejaculating on someone’s face. I acknowledge how this conclusion could be interpreted as an act of degradation or a power play and use it to explore the relationship between human activity and increasingly erratic weather patterns. Storms have the ability to overwhelm, devastate, and at the very least instill fear in humans, partly because they’re beyond our control. Yet, we know that human-related climate change has manifested in drastic shifts in weather patterns. The intermittent fast-forwarding (and rewinding) of the storm by the human character meditates on our role in that equation while alluding to the ways we watch video content on our mobile devices. The cell phone video as a medium recognizes that the digital tool, the body, and the resulting images are entangled, rather than separate, entities.

Danielle is a Baltimore-based multimedia artist and educator. She received her B.S. in Film, Video & Theatre from Stevenson University in 2014 and her MFA from University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2021. Her immersive projection installation What to Expect When You’re Expecting, was awarded the Johns Hopkins Saul Zaentz Innovation Grant in 2019. Her work has been exhibited locally at 2640 Space, Normal’s, and Light City. Danielle has presented work internationally (virtually) at Taboo, Transgression, Transcendence Conference and through the Ars Electronica .ART Global Gallery.

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Raphael ARAR, Olivia ARAR. Food Carbon Footprint Index (FCF)

Imagine a dystopian future wherein late capitalism requires that individuals are solely responsible for the climate crisis. Imagine a future where government surveillance of individuals becomes the popular standard for curbing carbon emissions and non-compliance results in serious penalties. The Food Carbon Footprint Index (FCFI) imagines just that. FCFI, a design provocation based on this design fiction, requires participants to log their meals via a “government controlled web application” meant to audit individual consumption. The app will calculate the meal’s carbon footprint and index this “score” against other participants. Scores will be broad- casted for public scrutiny and collective shaming.

Raphael Arar works at the nexus of complex systems, transdisciplinary design and arts-based research. For the past decade, he has helped others both untangle messes and uncover opportunities through a balancing act of problem-solving and creative inquiry. He currently leads Systems at One Project, where he is working to design, implement and scale new forms of economics and governance that are equitable, ecological and effective. He also serves as a Board Member at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Previously, he led design for learners at Khan Academy, tackled ethical platforms of AI at IBM Research, taught media theory at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and designed over a hundred iOS apps with Apple. His artworks has been shown at museums, conferences, festivals and galleries internationally including the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Gamble House Museum, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and Athens Video Art Festival.

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Veronika SELLNER. Redesigning Ecosystems: Synthetic Biology, Art and the Non-Human

The current environmental collapse that we as society face on a day-to-day basis leads us to rethinking and redefining the known. In this presentation we will introduce how artistic interventions in synthetic biology are a useful tool not only for thinking about current challenges, but also for the future ones. Hand in hand, the philosophical approaches for such artistic practises will be laid out – namely the impact of speculative turn in philosophy. We perceive synthetic biology as a field of interdisciplinary cooperation, in which exact disciplines necessarily meet with (artistic) imagination and design. Therefore it offers the potential to discuss the future ecosystems beyond the experienced – including emancipation of the non-human actors. By giving voice to the non-human and designing organisms, we can create a new sustainability or perhaps keep the planet habitable.

Veronika Sellner is 2nd year PhD student in Digital Culture and Creative Industries at Masaryk University in Brno. She focuses on non-human perspective, artistic research, synthetic biology in art, speculative artistic methods and is interested in critical approaches to multidisciplinary research. She also publishes critical texts about contemporary art and teaches.