RIXC Art Science Festival 2021
Lauren RUIZ. Our Watchmen are Blind: An interrogation of Subterranean Labor
Stephanie ROTHENBERG, Suzanne THORPE. Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling
Kathryn BLAIR, Pil HANSEN, Lora OEHLBERG. Algorithmic Rituals: Embodied Explorations of Algorithmic Decision-Making
Gundega STRAUTMANE. Artistic Experiments with Artificial Languages
Ricardo Dal FARRA. Collective experiences of extended reality: The Understanding Visual Music – UVM project.
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Lauren RUIZ. Our Watchmen are Blind: An interrogation of Subterranean Labor
Invaders can be quiet, slow, unmeasured and unassuming. Invaders can consume and transform a landscape in an uncharted land. The most commonly known earthworms in North America, eisenia fetida and lumbricus terrestris, also known as red wigglers and nightcrawlers respectively, arrived with the first wave of European settlers burrowed inside potted plants and sacks of spoiled crops. These annelids, unaware of their ability to engineer ecologies as they traveled alongside their human counterparts as resources of free labor, now play a vital role in the complex systems of soil health and water treatment as humans confront the effects of micro- and nanoplastics and the resulting toxicants that cycle through soil, water, and animal bodies.
As a method for understanding the complex relationships between human and annelids, I am conducting a research-based multimedia project to discover the connections between animal labor, eco-colonialism and the rapid invasion of nanoplastics into our water, soil, and bodies. This paper will unpack my ongoing developments as well as my partnership with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County which unearthed more inquiries regarding soil health, the role of earthworms in local ecology, and the historical agricultural practices and belief systems that create the groundwork for industrial agriculture both locally and on a national scale. In addition to this research, I will discuss my recent digital works and multimedia projects including “Zone of Loss,” which features a multichannel audio experience of earthworms sounds with dwarfing sculptural elements to immense the viewer in an atmosphere of the subterranean.
Lauren Ruiz is a research based multimedia artist interrogating ecological contamination, institutional authority, and bioethics through speculative-fiction-based installations, interactive performance, and digital works. Her work calls attention to the direct effects of individual choices on the environment and the future of human existence amidst anthropogenic climate change.
Ruiz draws upon environmental data and science journals, climate fiction novels and horror films. Her interactive installations situate viewers in recognizable institutional spaces, affecting how they relate to the complex mechanisms of evolution, ecology, data, and identity relative to institutional power and personal embodiment.
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Stephanie ROTHENBERG, Suzanne THORPE. Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling
For our talk we will discuss our project “Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling,” a speculative operetta focused on the listening body of the heroic oyster. A water filter, sea level mitigator and food source, the oyster is a vital member of our ecosystem that knows habitats for settlement by sensing sound. Specifically, research conducted at North Carolina State University’s Department of Marine, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences found that the bottom-dwelling oyster knows suitable settlement habitats through a distinction of sound signatures in underwater soundscapes. For oysters, sound is a more reliable indicator than chemical exudates or patterns of light. Building on soundscape studies that feature the listening body as an onto-epistemological site, we will discuss how our project leverages data of harbor port movement to query the dynamic relationships between human activity and the wellbeing of oysters. Through the simulated sense of this sonically navigating being, in an immersive sound, visual and sculpted environment, we ask what does a safe harbor sound like? How do we tend to an oyster and how does it tend to us? And can the listening oyster guide us to a politics of mutual tending?
Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces her work investigates the power dynamics of techno utopias, global economics and outsourced labor. She has exhibited internationally including Eyebeam (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (US), House of Electronic Arts / HeK (CH), LABoral (ES), Transmediale (DE), and ZKM Center for Art & Media (DE). Residencies include ZK/U in Berlin, TOKAS / Tokyo Art and Space, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace and Eyebeam in NYC. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum, Artnet, Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic.
Suzanne Thorpe is an artist-scholar whose creative research intersects electronic music, feminist and ecological theory. Her work, which she composes and performs with a variety of media and technology, has been presented internationally. Weaving together traditional and creative research methods she studies past and present music-making sites as critical frameworks that animate social and political concerns and resist hierarchical social organization, normative identity articulation and material separation. Thorpe, who holds an MFA in Electronic Music & Media from Mills College, a Ph.D. in Integrative Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and is a Deep Listening instructor, having studied in depth with American composer and Deep Listening founder Pauline Oliveros, is currently a member of the Society of Fellows and a Mellon Teaching Fellow at Columbia University.
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Kathryn BLAIR, Pil HANSEN, Lora OEHLBERG. Algorithmic Rituals: Embodied Explorations of Algorithmic Decision-Making
We present Algorithmic Rituals, a facilitated art experience in which visitors create collaborative movement-based “rituals” to reflect on their technology use habits. To their movement, attendees layered in rules about how to relate their movements to that of other attendees. The goal of the experience is to provide an embodied way for attendees to explore technosocial issues around algorithmic decision making and habitual technology use and discuss them in an open, facilitated context.The embodiment aspect provides a dedicated space for reflection and relation to others. We describe the development and final form of the experience, including adaptations for the COVID-19 pandemic: using Zoom to mediate the experience. We present reflections from interviews with Algorithmic Rituals participants, contributing a unique perspective on creating experiences about the social and relational impacts of technology. This perspective is particularly relevant to embodied experiences mediated by technology.
Kathryn Blair is a PhD candidate in the Computational Media Design program at the University of Calgary. She completed her Master of Fine Arts there in 2018. Her work provides contexts in which people can explore the way our societies use algorithmic decision-making. She also creates wearable pieces exploring the relationship between the body and technology, and can often be caught scheming about how to hack things to be controlled by EEG headsets or soldering into the dead of night. She has been involved in the Calgary-based tech couture fashion show Make Fashion since 2013, and has shown her work in Alberta, British Columbia, China, the United States and Ireland.
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Gundega STRAUTMANE. Artistic Experiments with Artificial Languages
My research is offered as an original and substantial contribution to the fields of knowledge of new media arts and creative practice, and to the cognate fields of art history, art theory and art curation. The research focuses specifically on linguistic text codifications as a deliberate process inherent in certain visual artworks, and combines a survey of primary and secondary literature with a practice-led approach in which new digital artworks are created and analysed. The theories of Ferdinand De Saussure underpin the research in regard of ideas on structure in language, in particular the concept of the bilateral (two-sided) sign.
Several main areas of innovation are detailed in the research. Firstly, the identification of contemporary artworks that use the processes of codification and/or transcodification, combined with the exploration of self-created artworks that utilise such processes, with the aim of developing a framework that enables the characteristics of such artworks to be classified. Secondly, a detailed investigation of the processes involved in the artistic interpretation of linguistic code generation and/or new language creation; and thirdly, research into historical writing systems from different cultures worldwide which provide a rich source from which to inspire artists to create new language codes which could be embodied in artworks.
Gundega Strautmane is a Latvian artist, born in1987 in Ogre, Latvia. She is a PhD student in Liepāja University, department of New Media Art. Her research title is “Codification Art: Artistic Experimentation with Imaginary Languages and Codes”. For the last fifteen years, the artist has been working with art projects in the field of visual and haptic poetry. In her earlier projects, Gundega makes use of Braille code and creates works that are perceivable for both the viewers with good eyesight and also visually impaired people. In her latest projects artist continues with her imaginary language compositions in the new media art field.
For the last ten years, Strautmane has been working in different art schools as a teacher of computer graphics. From 2014 until 2018 in Art Academy of Latvia, Latgale branch as a head of the Department of Textile Art department and computer graphic lecturer in Department of Graphic art. Form 2021 Gundega Strautmane is working as a computer graphic lecturer in Latvia University, Department of Art and Technologies. Previously Gundega has studied textile art at the Experimental Textile Design Institute in Berlin Art University, the Art Academy of Latvia and Riga Technical University.
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Ricardo Dal FARRA. Collective experiences of extended reality: The Understanding Visual Music – UVM project.
Increasingly, today’s collective immersive experiences focus on a kind of extended reality in which we coexist with presentiality and virtuality. The audience, in a planetarium, surrounded by multiple projections on the dome and multi-channel audio, can simultaneously perceive the richness and depth of images in space, as well as the movement and distribution of sounds and music at different distances and travelling along different paths, while being able to maintain contact with their surroundings and even touch people nearby. This can produce a state of reality, or awareness, that reaches surprising dimensions when interwoven with certain artistic expressions.
The project “Understanding Visual Music – UVM” explores these possibilities through collective experiences, investigating ways to enrich the encounter between art, science, and emerging technologies, offering immersive environments that lead our senses to explore new territories.
References:
– Smirnov, A. (2013) Sound in Z. Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia. Koenig Books. Inglaterra.
– Understanding Visual Music – UVM. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/UVMvisualmusic
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Dr. Dal Farra is professor of electronic arts and music at Concordia University, Canada and director of the electronic arts research centre CEIARTE-UNTREF, Argentina. He is Founder of the international symposia Balance-Unbalance (BunB) and Understanding Visual Music (UVM). Dal Farra has been director of Hexagram in Canada, coordinator of the Multimedia Communication national program of the Federal Ministry of Education in Argentina, and researcher of UNESCO, France, for its project Digi-Arts. He designed university and high school programs on art-science. Ricardo created the Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection hosted by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Canada. He is a board member of ISEA International. Dal Farra is a composer and artist specialized in transdisciplinary actions with science and emergent technologies.