RIXC Art Science Festival 2021
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
________________
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.
________________
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.
________________
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.
________________
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.
________________
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).