RIXC Art Science Festival 2021
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.