RIXC Art Science Festival 2021
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.