RIXC Art Science Festival 2021
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.