RIXC Art Science Festival 2021
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.
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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.