VIRTUALITIES AND REALITIES

OPENING KEYNOTE LECTURES AND PERFORMANCE

Monika FLEISCHMANN and Wolfgang STRAUSS / David ROTHENBERG
Venue: The Latvian National Museum of Art

Monika FLEISCHMANN and Wolfgang STRAUSS. Shades of Virtuality

Virtual Reality (VR) is the technisation of perception, a translation of the natural senses into the telematic. Interfaces, such as data goggles and data gloves, invite us for immersion in virtual worlds in order to ‘comprehend’ , ‘touch’ or ‘being touched’.
Scale and Significance of VR Technology shifts with the arise of the Internet. Cyberspace – an interlinked Data Space – evolves into a new public forum of global display and absolute control, an enormous virtual mirror of real world events and the home of big data. In this context VR technology is experiencing a Renaissance, with data goggles now being extolled by the industry as the ultimate choice with the promise of developing superior immersion.
To keep pace with the growth of data knowledge over time, performative structures are needed that keep the mind alert and shake the memory.
Our own work will demonstrate how ‘difference’ and ‘new knowledge’ can emerge through immersive mixed reality installations. From Aby Warburg we borrow the concept of the Denkraum. Giulio Camillo, a spiritual ancestor of VR Art, inspired us in creating spaces of memory and knowledge. This is no longer the submersion into a virtual environment, but an actual experience of mnemonic landscapes that symbolise ideas and at the same time offer performative methods of reflection. Our presentation will trace the development of Virtuality from early artistic approaches in the field, such as Myron Krueger’s Responsive Environment (1972), to current VR-Art and raise the question: How do the ideas and visions of early VR pioneers compare to today’s immersive environments?

Biographies. Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss are Visionary Pioneers of Interactive Media Art. For „Home of the Brain – Philosophers Houses“ (1989-92), they received the Golden Nica of Prix Ars Electronica 1992 for the first Virtual Reality Art Work with Data Glove and Goggles, followed by numerous prestigious awards and accolades for their innovative approach and contribution to the digital world. They have worked with Virtual Immersive Environments since the 1980s, founded several Art+Technology Research Institutions in Germany such as Art+Com (Berlin), MARS Exploratory Media Lab (Bonn) and eCulture Factory (Bremen) at the renowned Fraunhofer Research. Their work is exhibited worldwide and collected by ZKM – Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe.

David ROTHENBERG. What’s It Like To Be A Nightingale? Adventures In Interspecies Music

Can one really communicate with other species through music? David Rothenberg has been trying to do this for many years, and his latest subject is the nightingale. With an adventurous group of musicians, scientists, and filmmakers, he is trying to get inside the aesthetic sense of this special bird. Has he succeeded?

In the opening performance – THE UNIVOCITY OF BEING, David Rothenberg will play a special solo version of his new piece for spoken word, electronics, and clarinet, involving the ideas of Thoreau, Hegel, and Tim Dee recording the wind….

Biography. Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg has performed and recorded on clarinet with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Iva Bittova, Elliot Sharp, Markus Reuter, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. Most of his work has an environmental theme and involves the sounds of nature, live and in the studio. He has sixteen CDs out under his own name, including “On the Cliffs of the Heart,” named one of the top ten releases of 1995 by Jazziz magazine and “One Dark Night I Left My Silent House,” a duet album on ECM with pianist Marilyn Crispell, called “une petite miracle” by Le Monde and named by The Village Voice one of the ten best CDs of 2010.
Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing, book and CD, published in seven languages and the subject of a BBC television documentary. He is also the author of numerous other books on music, art, and nature, including Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales, and Survival of the Beautiful, about aesthetics in evolution. His book and CD Bug Music, featuring the sounds of the entomological world, has been featured on PBS News Hour and in the New Yorker. His latest recordings are Berlin Bülbül, Cool Spring and. New Cicada Trio: Live In Beacon.
www.davidrothenberg.net

RECEPTION AND FESTIVAL EXHIBITION OPENING

VIRTUALITIES AND REALITIES
Venue: kim? Contemporary Art Centre

WELCOME WORDS AND OPENING TALKS:
Dace MELBARDE, Minister of Culture of the Republic of Latvia
Pieter (Jan) LANGENBERG, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Latvia
Dominique Claire PETTER, Counsellor, Deputy Head of Mission, Swiss Embassy
Rasa SMITE, Curator of RIXC Festival
Valentinas KLIMASAUSKAS, Programme Director of kim? Contemporary Art Centre,
and others.

OPENING OF THE FESTIVAL EXHIBITION – PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Marc LEE (CH), Jacques PERCONTE (FR), Juuke SCHOORL (NL), Brenna MURPHY (US), Hans BREDER (DE / US), Clement VALLA (US), Matteo ZAMAGNI & Daniel BEN-HUR (UK/IT), Zane ZELMENE (LV), The Swan Collective / Felix KRAUS (DE), Annie BERMAN (US), Felipe CUCKER & Hector RODRIGUEZ (HK), Gunta DOMBROVSKA (LV), Martin John CALLANAN (UK/IE), Nina FISCHER & Maroan EL SANI (DE), Santa FRANCE (LV), Greta HAUER (UK), Martin HESSELMEIER & Andreas MUXEL (DE/AT), Raphael KIM (UK), Michal KINDERNAY (CZ), Christopher MANZIONE & Seth CLUETT (US), Andrew MCWILLIAMS (UK), Melodie MOUSSET & Naem BARON (CH/FR), Hanns Holger RUTZ (AT), Julia SOKOLNICKA (PL/NL), Danielle ZORBAS (AU/GR).

Curator: Raitis Smits

Plenary Session. Immersive Technologies and Artistic Research

Lily DIAZ / Andrea MANCIANTI / Daniel LANDAU
Venue: The Art Academy of Latvia

Moderator: Rasa SMITE

Lily DIAZ. Interactive Diorama, Case Study Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of 1632 by Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

In my paper I will present and develop the notion of Interactive Diorama from the technical as well as artistic and design perspectives. The approach used will be trans-disciplinary, touching on media archeology devices (such as the diorama concept developed in 1825 by Louis Mandé Daguerre) and combining existing knowledge from different fields including art history, computer-mediated communications, design, human computer interaction, new media and philosophy.
Throughout the essay I will focus on investigating and analysing the relationship between virtual simulations in comparison to tangible counterparts that might exist, with the objective of better understanding the nature of digital matter.
A case study based on a virtual reality installation of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson will be presented. From this perspective, the diorama should not be seen as a representation of static forms but rather dynamic and performance-oriented space. This quality of ‘aliveness’ is even true in dioramas such as those found in natural history museums.

Biography. Lily Díaz is professor and leader of the Systems of Representation research group in the Aalto University, Media Lab. Her research work includes projects in areas such as information visualization, design and implementation of digital archives and interface design. She has also designed tools such as Image ImaNote (Image and Map Annotation Notebook) and SOL (Soft Ontology Layer). As an educator, she has developed and implemented curricula in new media and visualisation.
More information: http://sysrep.aalto.fi

Andrea MANCIANTI. Preliminary directions for a performative approach to VR

Virtual Reality (VR) as an immersive technology is promising to be ubiquitous in the near future in a variety of fields, as for the first time there is a global effort into making this technology potentially available and accessible for a much broader audience than ever before. Its relatively new history offers an exciting opportunity for media artists to confront with a genre where very few conventions are already solidified, if not to be written from scratch. At the same time, though, walking side to side with this potential, there are also risks and challenges. In the first place there is a persistent ideological fog in the mainstream rhetoric around VR, that, concentrating on concepts such as novelty, immersion and empathy, risks to overlook, downplay or ignore other important issues at stake. For this, I consider extremely important to develop a critical approach towards VR, in order to help put this tool into perspective and gain a more sober point of view in the discussion. In particular, in this presentation, I attempt to illustrate a few elements, both of theoretical and technical nature, I encountered during the initial phase of my journey as an artist researching such tools. I will discuss, in the first place, some more or less implicit aspects that, I feel, need to be brought into view. These include its commodified, “gadgety” nature, its eminently solitary, passive approach, as well as the proprietarity of most of its technology. Then, I will present some specific possibilities VR can offer in my personal artistic perspective. My approach towards this technology focuses on developing experimental artistic strategies to create “live” audiovisual performances, engaging more than one participant in shared multimodal experiences. The project is based on three key artistic ideas, acting as some guiding hypotheses: a blurred distinction between performer and spectator, the centrality of the body as a two-way sensory interface to access the experience, in-between passive reception and active agency, and the head-mounted-display (HMD) as a way to alter vision in favour of sound and touch.

Biography. Andrea Mancianti is a composer and performer mostly devoted to mixed music. He studied composition with Rosario Mirigliano and electronic music with Marco Ligabue in the conservatory of Florence. He also studied with Pierluigi Billone, George Aperghis, Tristan Murail, Beat Furrer and Yan Maresz, among others, and he participated to the IRCAM’s Cursus 1 in Paris (2013-2014). His background is otherwise rooted in progressive and psychedelic rock, free improvisation and IDM electronic music and he has been part of several bands as guitarist, electronic musician or composer/arranger, where he developed a strong need for collective, participated creative practices.

In his work he am interested in exploring the social and aesthetic boundaries between popular and contemporary music, questioning the roles of composer, performer and public. His latest projects investigate compositional and performative aspects of hybrid acoustic-electronics instruments extended through complex feedback networks and real-time sound analysis.

He is also part of the Helsinki Sound Electronic (HelSE) hack-lab, to approach instrument building from a DIY and DIT perspective and he is a strong supporter of open culture and copyleft.

His works have been written preferably together with specific players, through long-lasting collaborations and have been performed in Europe and USA, for institutions such as Ircam (Paris), Biennale Musica (Venice), Impuls and KUG (Graz) Nuova Consonanza (Roma), Sibelius Academy (Helsinki) and others. My latest pieces include Autophagy, written for ensemble A.S.K., No Heroics, please, for electric guitar and accordion, written for Promenade Sauvage, Apophenia, for actor/percussionist, bass clarinet, double bass and electronics and Epäjärjestelmällisyydestaköhän, for viola, electronics and low-fi devices.
https://www.andreamancianti.com/

Daniel LANDAU. Time-Body Study

Time-Body Study is a performative experiment exploring the impact re-embodiment in virtual reality has on the boundaries of body, identity and self. In the experiment participants, wearing a virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD), are re-embodied in the body of a 7, 40 and 80 year old person.
Inspired by the classic Rubber Hand Illusion (Botvinick & Cohen 1998) and the work of Prof. Mel Slater (Barcelona University), The Time-Body Study creates the re-embodiment illusion by having a participant see his virtual hands being touched in the virtual space while, simultaneously and in perfect sync, his real hands are being touched, by a live performer. Both Botvinick and Slater’s experiments used this mechanism to demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate our body representation so that a subject can experience a rubber or virtual hand as his own. In Time-Body Study Daniel Landau adds narrative layers to the re-embodiment experience in an attempt to explore this cognitive mechanism on an emotional level. The audience get to see both the participant’s view of the virtual body (projected onto a large screen) and the live performer’s interactions. This gives the audience a unique view of the experiment demonstrating how the human body is effectively an evolving medium subjected to its technological environment.

Biography. Daniel Landau is a media artist, researcher and a lecturer. He completed his second degree in music-technology at the Royal Conservatory in The Netherlands where he lived and worked for close to a decade. Daniel’s work resides in the intersection of Art, Technology, and Science – exploring the complex relationship between body and technology. Core to his work is the attempt to trace techno-political processes and their impact on social and private spaces. His work has been presented in major venues, museums and festivals worldwide including Jerusalem, New-York, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, Paris Hungary and Mexico City. Between 2012-16 Daniel led Media Studies department at the Midrasha Faculty of the Arts, Beit Berl Academic College and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya. Daniel is the Co-founder and Director of Oh-Man, Oh-Machine – an art, science, and technology platform that includes an international conference, workshops, and a research lab.

Parallel Session A1. Immersive Environments: Time, Space And Visuality

Jorge SOBEJANO and Alvaro MOLINS / Camilla JALLER / Jonah BRUCKER-COHEN / Hiba ALI / David SCHMUDDE
Venue: The Art Academy of Latvia

Moderator: Christopher MILLER

Jorge SOBEJANO, Alvaro MOLINS. Black Islands

The Google Earth algorithm is a constantly evolving system. Its database’s updates provide an ever-clearer view of the Earth’s surface, however, there are still dissonant spots. Momentary interferences in the connection between satellites and terrestrial receivers, errors in the process of mapping a flat image over a virtual topography or the censoring action of many states on certain points of their geographical representation give rise to new territorial typologies.
Google, Panoramio, Wikipedia and other virtual devices provide new ways of inhabiting, colonizing and occupying indefinite locations through techniques of collective appropriation.
Present geopolitical tensions such us the South China Sea conflict, mainly based on the struggle for control over raw materials, enlighten open gaps for interpretation by means of these new representation techniques. Virtual borders offer new arguments for the real-world conquest.
According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, an island is a natural extension of land surrounded by water. Blalck islands are a series of errors manifested in Google Earth’s surface through black spots; Virtual voids. Vacation pictures, military videos, comments and threads geo-tagged on its surroundings provide these uncertain spaces with the necessary legal conditions to become real. Each image reflects the individual experience of a user in a given moment. The set of these experiences constructs a space out of fragments.
Virtual devices enable the possibility of transforming random failures into new territory.
“Balck Islands” delves into the influence of new ways of describing reality in the generation of new landscapes, borders and appropriation processes.

Camilla JALLER. A Sense of Time in Transit Spaces – Video projection artworks in public train station buildings

This project intends to develop a new theoretical approach aimed at investigating how casual viewers and passers-by meet and experience digital artworks in public space. The main assumption is that digital artworks have important artistic potentials when placed in transit spaces. These potentials connect to particular issues of temporality, which permit specific sight perceptions and senses of time. As such, the artworks function as catalysts for what I term “time travel spaces”, which as an artistic strategy responds to the contemporary accelerated and compressed temporality and spatiality. The “time travel space” takes its departure from the time-space compression initiated by the Industrialisation and evolves in relation to historically and technologically conditioned sight perceptions including train travel, the panorama, and the diorama. By focusing on the human experience of the artworks this project insists on the embodied human subject as the focal point for investigations of visual phenomena and visuality in general, but also for any studies regarding ontemporary urban space. The viewers’ experiences do matter and we need to take affective and perceptive experiences seriously as co-creative forces sculpturing our shared urban space. By further coupling the “time travel space” with Mark B.N. Hansen’s theory of affect, the possibility for an enlargement of the “now” emerges. This is not only an expansion of space but of time as space. The “time travel space” thereby not only conditions a specific gaze, perception, and sense of time, but also a specific time consciousness which comments on our contemporary fluidly digital world.

Jonah BRUCKER-COHEN. Socializing Public Spaces With Shared Input From Mobile Devices

This talk will discuss recent projects I am working on that focus on allowing large-scale collaborative input from people in shared spaces using data from the mobile devices such as cellphones and tablets. Beginning with an earlier project of mine called “SimpleTEXT” (2003) that encouraged mass contributions from people sending text messages from mobiles phones to drive a public performance, I will expand on this project by introducing a new product I have launched called “Lively” that takes advantage of the ubiquity of mobile devices using browser-based output and WebGL visualizations of incoming text messages by large audiences. The project has been performed at a wide range of public spaces such as large conferences, public movie theaters and performance spaces, and co-working spaces. I will also discuss a recent commissioned work called “Healing Destinations” I created for Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, NY that encourages people to use their cellphones in waiting spaces in the hospital to engage in anonymous collaborative travel through sending text messages of destinations to a 3D model of the earth.

Biography. Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Ph.D., is an award winning researcher, artist, and writer. He is an Assistant Professor at Lehman College / City University of New York and received his Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin. His thesis entitled “Deconstructing Networks” includes over 100 projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience and have been exhibited at venues such as SFMOMA, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Art, MOMA, ICA London, Whitney Museum of American Art, Palais du Tokyo, Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and more. His project, “Bumplist”, is included in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His Scrapyard Challenge workshops have been held in 15 countries since 2003.

Hiba ALI. Deconstructing Network Visualities

My practices focuses on invisible information flows we take as granted and makes these processes tangible, particularly investigating the labor behind the objects are produced from techno-globalization. How are present day circuits organized and how did they come to be in the present? How do historic entanglements and restrictions of mobility arise in the present?
In the experimental lecture that follows, I will speak on my arts practice where I investigate these objects, the satellite and shipping crate, in the projects called Satellites and Con-tain-er, and the systems in which the operate and their impact on how we perceive the world.
Satellites are part of a global flow of information as is the shipping container, both are tuned in of “streams” of different sorts. Their movements have shaped our reality and connect us to many people of the world and usually labour, in their production, goes unseen as the object’s product. I connect this to rise of a surveillance society and the process in which this technology can be used to empower people.
Con-tain-er traces the circuits of globalization through the movement of this object. This installation refers to the uneven spread of globalization, specifically how corporatization effects labor and how import and export effect local and global exchanges. The global shipping industry is indicative of our contemporary moment of globalization and shifting political alliances. We are connecting to a larger network and by understanding how a circuit is constructed, we can challenge and change how the system functions.

Biography. Hiba Ali is a new media artist and writer based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. She holds two undergraduate degrees from the School of the Art Institute Chicago with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film, Video, New Media and Animation and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Critical Studies. She is presently a Master of Arts candidate at University of Texas-Austin. She has worked with diverse populations and community organizing and employs digital technology in ways that empower people. She conducts workshop around open source technologies and personal and colonial histories. Her sculptural installations focus on the history of objects that are produced from global circuits and their embedded codes, encompassing both the technological and sociological. She has exhibited in Chicago (IL), Toronto (ON), New York (NY), Istanbul (TR), Detroit (MI), Ann Arbor (MI), London (UK) and Dubai (UAE).

David SCHMUDDE. Manifesting Human Relationships in Art and Technology

The internet has produced a tangibly interconnected world. In hindsight, its grammar of nodes, edges, and protocols is as organic as natural language. This presentation examines the discovery of packet-switched networks from a mid-century context and reveals the metaphors for human interaction and consciousness baked within; concepts that provide a foundation for discussing post-digital contemporary art.
Technology has revealed many startling truths, from the quantum world to the psychology of human motivation, and the internet is no different. Contemporary insights into the themes of human interconnections and the metaphysical self are incorporated by artists attempting to reflect the world around them. “Borderless,” an interactive, immersive installation produced with my partner Kim Burgas, serves as the main vehicle for illustrating these themes. The installation blurs the edges of the physical self by visually and aurally depicting our extra-corporal extensions into the world.
Floating bodies intertwine as soundscapes shift based on the audience’s position in the “Borderless” experience. Like networked systems, ephemeral interactions, not the individual nodes, create definition. The challenge of the artist is to manifest the intangible reality. Technology thus becomes the means for both scientific discovery and creative expression in the twenty-first century.

Parallel Session B1. Immersive Environments: Body and Perception

Miguel ALMIRON and Guillermo CROSETTO / Richard MERRITT / KORSTEN & DE JONG / Asim HAMEED / Christina DELLA GIUSTINA
Venue: The Latvian National Museum of Art

Moderator. Kristin Bergaust

Miguel ALMIRON, Guillermo CROSETTO. Virtual Reality, the empathic machine?

The immersive-art experience breaks the limits between virtual and the real, leading them to a closer relationship with reality. In the year 1995 Char Davies realized the artwork Osmose. In this work in particular, the artist submerged the spectator in a world of digital imagery, and proposed him to establish a limit between technology and his internal self. Twenty years later, with his work Clouds over Sidra, Chris Milk submerges us by means of virtual imagery, subverting and taking us into the unbearable experience of the real.
The appropriation of technological devices, in the artist’s path generates a considerable potential (thanks to constant investigation, update, improvement, promptness of technical investigations of the device). Approaching the creation of an extension of the body, an extension of the skin, arriving to the point of creating systems to restore life’s sensations, in and by technologies.

Biographies. Miguel Almiron, Ph.D. ‘Aesthetics, Sciences & Technologies of Art’, is a Media Artist and Assistant Professor at the University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France. He is a member of research lab (LISAA, EA 4120) and “Les Arts trompeurs”.
He leads a theoretical and technical practice exploring and reflecting on the possibilities of expressing the senses of body, and the human being through the use of new digital technologies.

Guillermo Crosetto is an architect and industrial designer, graduated at the Domus Academy, Milan. He is the co-author of the book “Textiles – innovations et matieres actives”. He works today in Paris as a Lacanian psychoanalyst.

Richard MERRITT. Ethereal Empathy: Creating Spaces for Intersectionality

Ethereal Empathy: Creating Spaces for Intersectionality is a translatable set of investigative research principles that can be applied to any site-specific locale, whether online, offline, virtual, or augmented. The results of the research are ongoing interactive installations that seeks to alter the way we are aware of a space rather than drastically altering the space itself, thus allowing for the possibility that a space may become both a tangible and ethereal memory palace. It’s our goal that this project serve as a dynamic critical multi-cultural space wherein a variety of constructs, beliefs and values, sometimes shared, sometimes oppositional can be duly recognized, analyzed, and mediated. Through active or passive participation with the Ethereal Empathy installation, our viewers become viscerally aware of the presence of their own bodies in connection with other bodies; this serves as both a conduit to understanding intersectionality but also an invitation to meta-cognition. Local source material coupled with the use of our proprietary social media analytic tools, infrared motion capture software/hardware, software images of visitor motions will be tracked and projected on the walls and ceilings as ghostlike images and biometric motion data. Accompanying the projection will be relevant archival materials, music, text motion and sound.

Biography.Richard is a trans disciplinary artist whose work sits at the cross roads of aesthetic object, social practice arts and scholarship. Richard’s most recent research and publications include; Non-Zero-Sum, Drawing Transciscipilnarity: The Discipline of Visual Arts and the Challenge of Complex Problems at the American University of Paris, Our Future Selves Remain the Ghosts of Our Past at Digital Cultural Heritage Stadtbibliothek , Berlin Richard K. Merritt has lectured and exhibited nationally and internationally most recently at Oxford University U.K. and Kyoto Japan. His scholarly work has appeared in numerous publications among them Leonardo Journal of Arts and Sciences of the MIT press as well as the proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. Richard is a Professor of Art at Luther College in Decorah Iowa where he teaches Art and Technology; a software and hardware development course, critical theory and drawing.

KORSTEN & DE JONG. Paper-Performance ‘Back-Space’

“I think we are moving from a data-exploration paradigm to a data-storytelling one.” – Rogers 1 De Certeau envisioned an advent of the number.2 He says: “It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes […].”3 And Manovich raised as a possible objection, concerning the transformation of deep data into surface data, that “[a] “pixel” that originally represented one person comes to represent 1000 people”4 Korsten&DeJong react on these conceptions in dialogues which they record, transcribe, question, and alter. This dynamic reciprocity between form and content needs space, which becomes scarce with the accumulation of data. In their paper-performance ‘Back-Space’, Korsten&DeJong will mine their own data-field using De Certeau’s narrative figures like frontiers and bridges. “[…] [T]he story
plays a decisive role. It “describes,” to be sure. But “every description is more than a fixation,” it is “a culturally creative act.”” […] Then it founds spaces.”5

Biography. Korsten & DeJong are Dutch based independent artists and theorists and affiliated to ArtEZ Institute of the Arts, the Netherlands. Korsten & De Jong are curious about the conceptual and physical relation of their work with the context and its beholder. In this sense one could call their work engaged. Their work is mostly sharpened by much the same motives. Both believe in the strength of resistance; literally experienced in making work and metaphorically in thinking and working together and with contextual conditions. This resistance, this delay, contributes to works which relate in a ‘frictuous’ manner to site, form and concept in such a way that it reveals what may have been hidden behind convention. Website links: www.mariekedejong.nl & www.saskiakorsten.nl

Asim HAMEED. Body: a site of virtualization.

Times are good if you are a start-up, corporate or research lab associated with nurturing technologically induced realities. There are a host of acronyms and a rich jargon du jour for the computer-generated (simulated) environments/objects/places/people that describe their association to reality. Some immersive, others augmented; whatever the spin, business is thriving, and under current circumstances theory can’t hold back. While the more common approaches to VR/AR/MR developments continue to be inundated by issues of realism, ocularcentrism and disembodiment — we look at the body as a site for virtualization. This study takes an interdisciplinary method in tracing the Bergsonian and Deleuzian nature of the affective body — as a source of “virtual” and “haptic” spaces. It explores research strategies and approaches as well as artworks and literature to develop a discourse that can bear positive implications for the technologically induced realities.
We find a moralist-to-ethical distinction when this approach to the body shifts: what can a body do to rather what is a body? This direction dislodges the “passive” body (in common philosophy) for a more affective body thus privileging immanence.A phenomenological discourse considers the body as the site for the emergence of experience outside our perceptive vocabulary. Considering, that we have evolved with the constantly ubiquitous reference of gravity. there is relevance in observing that the affective body is not an inactive receiver but the sum total of its capacity to affect and stand affected. In that respect, our sense of reality (as plural) and perception (neither truth nor illusion but differing modes of reality) is deeply tied to the body. A body that is more than a pre-conceived assembly of organs with a neurologically controlled cognition system. But a body without organs, that is affective from within. A body that is actively involved in “producing the ‘virtual reality’ of our everyday lives”.

Christina DELLA GIUSTINA. you are variations, towards version 08

you are variations’ is an on-going cluster of events that interprets long-term monitoring data from the life of trees as a musical score, and that enacts the score through performance, concert and light-/sound environments.
The work consists of translating scientific measurements of tree activity into compositions that recall the tree as organism. The resulting enactment of the score is conceived as re-creation of the tree as measured by science in the form of a collaborative live event.
you are variations’ draws attention to the complex water cycling and sophisticated energy balance of trees under changing conditions. The contemporary climatic situation displays a complexity and emergence of entanglements that no single disciplinary approach and no solitary operation of knowledge production can tackle adequately
What I feel is needed today is a collaborative, post-disciplinary, post-digital combination of critical forms of engagement. It is for the sake of all human and non-human beings with whom we would like to live together and be intimate with.
you are variations’ proposes a hybrid approach which is aesthetic, scientific and political in the sense of experimenting with unfamiliar modes of both understanding the world and acting in it.
The challenge the research project sets out is to understand the tree, the score and the performance as organisms on different scales. It aims to meet the task by experimenting with scientific and aesthetic settings that allow for a condition of perceiving oneself as separated from, in the vivinity of, related to or together with the tree.

Biography. Christina Della Giustina is an artist based in Amsterdam. She is enrolled in the PhD-program at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London and lectures digital media at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. Christina studied Fine Art and Political Theory at Jan-van-Eyck Academy Maastricht and Philosophy,
Art History and Linguistics at University Zürich. Her practice deals with the relationship between water and selves and includes site-sensitive work with data, sound, light, performance, composition, drawing and writing. It has been shown at Woburn Centre London; Haus-der-Kulturen-der-Welt, Berlin; NIMK Amsterdam; Soledad-Senlle Amsterdam; Montreux Jazz Festival; Shanghai-Contemporary-Art; Botanical Gardens, Zürich; Kunsthalle Zürich.

Parallel Session A2. Brainwaves and Immersive Data Visualizations / Biometrics

Orr MENIROM / Karen LANCEL / Chris HALES / Sean MONTGOMERY / Jukka HAUTAMAKI
Venue: The Art Academy of Latvia

Moderator: Ellena Pearlman

Orr MENIROM. Clinton and Sanders Looking at the World and Naming Things for the First Time

Take a look at today’s newspaper. The front page features a photo, and this photo is covered with headlines and captions. As images and text are becoming increasingly merged together into a single syntax, it’s impossible to differentiate between text and image, virtual and real.Does language still contain meaning? This video seeks to find out not what, but how the meaning is. The visuals of a political debate have been removed and replaced with a series of dreamlike images. The debate becomes a Rorschach test, maintaining an associative connection to the politicians’ speeches. This test is inspired by “Deep-Dream”, a machine-learning technology trained to recognize visual patterns. The programmer trains“Deep-Dream”by presenting it with images(for example—of dogs) and naming them (“dog”). However, after numerous iterations, a side effect occurs: “Deep-Dream”starts imagining dog faces everywhere (pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon of the mind perceiving familiar patterns where they don’t exist).The idea that “Deep Dream” generates images out of its own imagination or subconscious is called“Machine-Dreaming”. Trump’s election took many by surprise.Are we, like“Deep Dream”,trapped in mind patterns that prevent us from perceiving reality as it is? The brain’s tendency to look for meaning and patterns is stronger when there is a feeling of a lack of control—for example, at times of political change and uncertainty. Which comes first— seeing a pattern, or imagining it in the mind?

Biography. Orr Menirom’s videos explore the border between what is real and what is barely or beyond perceptible. She is a recipient of a Jan Van Eyck Academy Research Fellowship (2017) and a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency (2016). She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. Exhibition venues include: Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Des Moines Art Center, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Expo Chicago.

Karen LANCEL. E.E.G. KISS – Kissing the intimate uncanny

Technologies change our reality of embodied cognition; and social proximity and ecology. While extending our bodies in space and time they prevent us from reciprocal touching. Data-traces of emerging haptical, quantifying ‘extimate’ technologies, intimate and external, familiar and unfamiliar, beneficial yet intrusive, feed our fears and desires. (J. Brenninkmeijer; H. Zwart, 2016). This paper discusses an experimental design for critical reflection on our co-existence as interdependent bodies in symbiosis with technologies (M. Hansen, 2006). Artistic social lab ‘E.E.G. KISS’, a human-robotic system for collective, intimate and embodied relationality, is designed and internationally presented. Visitors act as co-researchers in a reflective, electric ritual for kissing and datafication. They kiss with E.E.G. headsets measuring their brainwaves activity. Their bio-metric data are translated to immersive data visualization, algorithm and music score. In a public participatory neuro-feedback system they feel, see, hear and touch a COMMUNAL KISS. In this paper, the experimental synaesthetic synthesis design is analyzed and the visitors performativity, agency and ‘reflection through interaction’ is explored (K. Kwastek, 2013). From both an artistic and scientific perspective, this research calls for articulating trans-human desire, sharing imagination on embodied cognition: How does your kiss feel in E.E.G. data?

Biography. LANCEL is artistic PhD candidate at Technical University of Delft Participatory Systems Initiative (promotores Prof. dr. Frances Brazier, Dr. Caroline Nevejan); and art commitee advisor for Mondriaan Fund (2014-2017) and for Amsterdam City Public Art (Stadsdeel Zuid) (2013-2017). She was member of the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK) research group ‘ARTI’ (Artistic research, Theory & Interpretation) (Dr. M. Hoogenboom, Prof. H. Borgdorff) 2008-2011; and headed the MFA interactive media art department (IME/ MADtech, core lecturer) at Frank Mohr Institute Groningen 2005-2008.

Chris HALES. Interactive Stories for the Brain: Interaction and Response in Brainwave-Influenced Non-linear Films

Eisenstein was one of the first filmmakers to consider the psychological aspects of film montage and the possibility now exists by means of inexpensive EEG (electroencephalography) devices to obtain a measurable analysis of the psychological impact of film watching, and therefore to create non-linear film structures navigable by the received brainwave data. This paper will discuss filmmaking techniques and narratological strategies by which interactive films can be designed so as to respond to such a hardware interface—in this case a low-cost consumer device called the Neurosky Mindwave which sends out numerical values representing the user’s attention and meditation. Unlike the typical situation whereby specific choices in a non-linear film can be consciously selected by a deliberate action, the EEG data cannot be accurately controlled by a user’s power of thought, and distraction readily occurs. A question that arises is: does it matter to the filmwatcher that the science involved is probably inaccurate and unreliable?
A variety of films designed for the Mindwave—some made by students in ‘workshops’—will be discussed and Janet Murray’s issues of immersion and agency will be used as theoretical reference points. Immersion is of particular interest because a recent trend in EEG headset manufacture is to combine them with Virtual Reality headsets. In 2017 the Myndplay company released its VR plug-and-play Myndband and made an open call for ideas for mind-controlled VR content, suggesting more research and experimentation is needed to find out the most engaging filmic strategies when 360-degree films are controllable by brainwaves.

Biography. Specialist of the interactive moving image, as artist-practitioner, educator and researcher. His 2006 PhD ‘Rethinking the Interactive Movie’ developed the concept of ‘movie as interface’. Visiting lecturer in a variety of educational institutions with over 150 workshops or courses delivered to date. Docent of the Liepāja University ‘New Media Art’ programme, teaching at Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral level (supervisor and organiser of triannual doctoral colloquium weeks). Exhibitions of interactive film installations date from ARTEC’95 in Japan, to ZKM’s Future Cinema (2003), the Prague Triennale of 2008, and the X111 Media Forum in Moscow in 2012.

Sean MONTGOMERY. Synergy in Art and Science: From Groundwater to Brainwaves / Hive Mind

HIVE MIND is a peek into the future of augmented cooperative cognition. Pulses of light and sound, synchronized to the brain rhythms of two performers, create an immersive environment that transports the audience to altered states of consciousness. Based on neuroscientific research showing that rhythmic stimuli can entrain neuronal oscillations to alter perception, memory formation, and mood, HIVE MIND uses the performers’ live EEG and data processing to directly convey the performers’ brain states. As one performer’s brainwaves become the stimuli that entrains the other performer’s brain patterns, a public brainwave-driven conversation unfolds between the performers. Together the performers and audience go on a journey through different induced brain states and altered perceptions, ultimately considering broad implications for the future of human cognition and communication.

Biography.  Produce Consume Robot (Sean Montgomery) is a technologist, educator and new-media artist in New York City. Using research methodologies combined with emerging technologies, Sean takes a trans-disciplinary look at the human condition to examine the changing relationship between the physical and metaphysical world. Since finishing his Ph.D. in Neuroscience, Sean has created numerous installation art works that raise questions about the relationship between technology and the human experience, showing at venues around the world including ISEA, Istanbul Biennal, Science Gallery Dublin, Harvestworks (New York), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Daejeon Museum of Art, and many others.

Jukka HAUTAMAKI. Interfacing in live electronics performances.

Finnish sound artist Jukka Hautamäki (b. 1971) will be talking about how he makes live electronics sound performances with his diy instruments.
Hautamäki’s sound performances are microscopic studies into electronic sound. By reconnecting electric circuits he creates possibilities for unexplainable sonic phenomena, to which he reacts by improvising with sound. He is curious to study methods for creating sonic narration in relation to magic and hauntology, and turning trash- aesthetics into instruments of live electronics.
Hautamäki works with elements such as underhood work lights, electromagnetic sources, coil mics, diy amps and radio waves. He is interested in how the design of the interfaces of his sound devices affect the artistic process of performing with live electronics. What is the relationship between art, craft, electronics and lo-fi aesthetics in his sound art practice?
In his live electronics performances he experiments with interfacing, by integrating bodily performance with media technology. Hautamäki will adress the concept of “forced” improvisation: his intentional challenge of using difficult interfaces, and using chaos for inventiveness.

Biography. Sound and media artist Jukka Hautamäki (b. 1971 Oulu) lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Hautamäki works with found materials, electronics, sound, light and video. His music style could be described as abstract noise with a rhythmic twist. Hautamäki has performed live in Europe and North America. Performance venues include La-bas Biennale, Lal lal lal and AAVE festival in Helsinki, Ges21 in St. Petersburg, Mengi in Reykjavik, Avatar Centre in Quebec City, Electric Knife in London, Madame Claude in Berlin, CT-SWaM at Fridman Gallery, Harvestworks and Trans-Pecos in New York. Hautamäki has kept numerous interactive sound art and electronics workshops, courses and lectures in Finland (Kiasma, Aalto University, Art & Craft School Robotti, MUU), Europe and North America. More information: jukkahautamaki.com

Parallel Session B2. Neomateriality and Post-Digital Aesthetics

Winnie SOON and Sarah SCHORR / Raivo Kelomees / Doville DAGIENE / Violetta DE SAGA / Cristina COCHIOR
Venue: The Latvian National Museum of Art

Moderator: Hiba ALI

Winnie SOON, Sarah SCHORR. Screen Shots: Critical Codes of Capture

What is the distinct materiality of screen shots as a mode of capture? Print Screen (or PrtSc) is a button commonly found in present keyboards, where the computer commands, such as “screencapture” and “scrot,” are used in various operating systems to reproduce a computer screen. Before making the screenshot, the objects in the frame are moved in the act of composition and the shot then captures the ephemerality of objects that are both immaterial and material, physically occupying a space in computer memory. What material substrates are being captured? What kind of artistic practices have emerged from and through the act of screen capturing when computer code is performed underneath? In the following presentation, we discuss two of our artworks that use screenshot practice, highlighting the inherent entanglement of humans and nonhumans, subjects and objects in order to explore the materiality of this specific mode of capture. These two works, My Dad’s Networked Watch (Schorr 2017) and Unerasable Images, (Soon 2017) both arise from the shared impulse to archive the screen as artists but employ contrasting strategies. We argue that the screen shot practice interrogates the specific materiality of ephemeral digital space, in which nothing can be fully erased (Kirschenbaum 2012). Through our two works that employ screenshots as part of artistic processes, we analyze how creating screen shots can produce affective, compositional and evidential traces within and beyond the frame of the shot.

Biographies. Winnie Soon is an artist-researcher who resides in Hong Kong and Denmark. Her work approach spans the fields of artistic practice and software studies, examining the materiality of computational processes that underwrite our experiences and realities in digital culture. Winnie’s work has been presented at festivals, conferences and museums throughout the Asia Pacific, Europe and America, including but not limited to Transmediale2015/2017, ISEA2015/2016, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Si Shang Art Museum, Pulse Art + Technology Festival, Hong Kong Microwave International Media Arts Festival, FutureEverything Art Exhibition. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Digital Design in Aarhus University. www.siusoon.net

Sarah Schorr is an American artist and researcher. She received her PhD from the department of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University in Denmark and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. Her research focus is photography, social media, and visual methods. These fascinations often intersect with her photographic art projects. Since her first solo show in 2004 at Scalo Project Space in New York City, she has exhibited her work internationally. “Borrowed Glitter,” a catalogue of her visual work is available through the Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Raivo KELOMEES. From Net Art to Post-Internet Art: The Cyclical Nature of Art Movements

It makes sense to look back at the experience of net art in the 1990s. This was an era of innocence, eagerness and heroes of a kind, when net art works as art were brand new.
In the 1990s, art had to be brought to the internet, settled there and only then was it possible to see how the environment influenced the content, whereas in the current post-digital and post-internet era, the internet environment is like nature: it surrounds us.
The most significant names were Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Jodi.org, Vuc Ćosić, Graham Harwood and Heath Bunting, and the theoreticians were Tilman Baumgärtel, Josephine Bosma, Geert Lovink, Pit Schultz and others. The brightest star was Shulgin, the author of the fictitious birth story of the term “net.art”.
I am discussing work of a great emotional potential by Estonian Laur Tiidemann “Piano” (2000).
How to characterize artistic trends in context of following terms: post-internet art, post-digital, post-media?
I am drawing sketchy development curve from net art to post-internet art.
The critical voices on net art were heard since its birth. In 1997 I interviewed Lev Manovich, Geert Lovink, Andreas Broeckmann and Alexei Shulgin, tentatively touching upon the emerging trend. The rising “wave” was clearly perceived.
I am discussing terms: post-media, the post-media condition, Mainstream Contemporary Art (MCA) and New Media Art (NMA). The last ones as they were proposed by Edward Shanken in an article in 2010 and dicussed during Art Basel in 2010 between the curators Nicolas Bourriaud and Peter Weibel.
Finally I am diving into list of post-internet art definitions to ask a question about new media trends in context of the history of last 25 years.

Biography. Raivo Kelomees, PhD (art history), artist, critic and new media researcher. Studied psychology, art history, and design in Tartu University and the Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Has published in main cultural and art magazines and newspapers of Estonia since 1985. Book author, “Surrealism” (Kunst Publishers, 1993) and an article collections “Screen as a Membrane” (Tartu Art College proceedings, 2007), “Social Games in Art Space” (Estonian Academy of Arts, 2013). Doctoral thesis „Postmateriality in Art. Indeterministic Art Practices and Non-Material Art“ (Dissertationes Academiae Artium Estoniae 3, 2009).

Doville DAGIENE. Anthropology of memory and imagination: time and place in photography

The creative and research parts of the proposal submitted for the Open Fields 2017 conference constitute the extention of the topic examined during previous years – Image and text: the problem of interpretation of photographs and poetry. This survey served as a significant initial impulse for the further more extensive exploration that aims at understanding the relations and interconnections of memory and interpretations of visual language. Creative and research components of the artistic project seeks to verify the hypothetical assumption that personal memory of concrete individual and topographical historical memory of a particular locus determines the peculiarity of photography as visual language, its perception and understanding. It is presupposed that a narrative in photography is indistinguishable from place and time, however, the question immediately arises – how is time represented in photograph? The dimension of time in photography is distinct from present in cinematography, in spite of the superficial similarities of two visual technologies. One may say that in photography, where the moment is halted, the temporal dimension is absent completely or represented only indirectly.
The latest research has been conceived as a reflection of creative experience in pursuit of the ways to capture memory and imagination through the medium of photography.

Biography. Dovilė Dagienė (born 1981) is a photographer and lecturer who lives and works in Vilnius. In 2007 graduated from Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, Photography and Media Art with MA degree. She is PhD student in the Photography and Media Art Department at Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts.
Her research interests include memory, imagination, time and place in photography. Currently she’s working the boundaries of analogue photographic mediums with her latest project on astrophotography.

Violetta DE SAGA. Transcendence in Immanence

“Transcendence in Immanence“ is an Art-Science project in progress with series of performative and interactive installations that will include sound & visual art, as well as contemporary postmodern technical technologies, interdisciplinary science fields and science-related new media art:
“ Blue in Green ” is a video-installation based on the philosophy of suprematic forms of Kazemir Malevich and the philosophy of cosmism.  It is about life and death, a merging point of transcendence and immanence where life and death affirms the organic synthesis of dialectal opposites that are transcendent through staying immanent within actual or present awareness. “ … Between sky and earth, having overcome gravity, geometricized structures were formed in weightlessness …“ R. Khidekel
“Soundscapes of Tide A“ is an interactive video-installation and sound scape created with a help of an analog oscillator.This work gives you the opportunity to create your own rhythms and sounds , through analog generated oscillator. Determinism of the video entangles with with the indeterminism of the sound scape of the oscillator.
Earthly spaces that lead us to find outer worlds and creating spatial-pictorial fantasies…
“Soundscapes of Tide D“ an interactive video-installation with a digital oscillator. Creating your own rhythms and sounds, through digitally generated oscillator.
“Landscapes of Movements“ an interactive video-installation with a sensor that detects movements. This work gives you the opportunity to change the video by movements.

Biography. I am an Ukrainian-Armenian artist based in Berlin, Germany. I was born in Aserbajdjan, grew up in India, studied and lived in Kiev, Amsterdam, Croatia and Berlin. Through my eclectic life experiences of radically different cultures, concepts like borders, nationality and other symptoms of closed mentalities became increasingly foreign to me. And of course it has been reflected in my interdisciplinary artistic practices starting from my early stages of artistic research, through theatre, music (jazz vocal), painting and performance art. In the past few years my artistic expression, approaches and methods grew into practice of abstract visual and sound art, as well as greatly, in contemporary postmodern technical culture, philosophy, interdisciplinary science fields and science-related new media art. As a result I pursued studies at Science Underground Academy, Dubrovnik, Croatia and Master course “Media & Art”, Prof. Dr. phil. Alberto De Campo, in the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. Performances and exhibitions that I created were shown in Museum of Modern Art of Strasbourg, France (2014), Multi-Media Festival Diffrazzioni in Florence, Italy (2016), Art galleries of Austria, Spain, Croatia, Ukraine and Germany.

Cristina COCHIOR. In The Company Of Bots

With the increase in the number of visitors on Wikipedia came new challenges of maintaining the reliability of information. The Wikipedia editor community has built and sustained what it calls a ‘culture of verifiability’ through the efforts of both humans and algorithms. An example of the latter is Cluebot NG, one of the most prolific bots on the platform and currently the sole based on a neural network, which scans the newest edits to detect and revert vandalism attempts.In my presentation I argue that the illusion of Cluebot NG’s autonomous operativity propelled its success as a policing agent and had the effect of anthropomorphising the algorithm while simultaneously reducing the social complexity of new editors to data points. Through the process of assigning human attributes to the bot, it becomes an agent in a mutating form of bureaucratic governance that is replacing charismatic humans, as Mathieu O’Neil proposed in his book Cyberchiefs, with charismatic code.
Bringing in focus one of the bots reflects larger patterns in the relationship between what are essentially human and non-human contributors collaboratively working together on a knowledge platform. This paper seeks to reveal how power is redistributed within this environment and what can be said about the human community by peering deeper into the algorithmic actors ecology.

Biography. Cristina Cochior (RO/NL) is a researcher and designer working in the Netherlands. With an interest in automation practices, disruption of the interface and peer to machine knowledge production, her practice consists of research investigations into knowledge sharing and bureaucratic systems. Having recently graduated from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, she is currently examining ecologies of algorithmic workers on digital platforms.

Parallel Session A3. Interactivity and Virtuality in Post-Digital Age

Kathryn BLAIR / Varvara GULJAJEVA / Vanessa Sonia SANTOS / Vytautas MICHELKEVIČIUS and Lina MICHELKEVIČE
Venue: The Art Academy of Latvia

Moderator: Jonah BRUCKER-COHEN 

Kathryn BLAIR. A Research Creation Process for Interactive Works

This session presents Kathryn Blair’s iterative research-creation practice investigating technological systems that use algorithms to make decisions, and inscribe those decisions on the body, by creating interactive art pieces that are a site for visitors to engage with ideas about the intersection of technology and our bodies. The session will include a breakdown of the phases of Blair’s research process: data collection, analysis, and synthesis, as well as how the iterative process has changed her work, and how she uses it to address technical, conceptual, and aesthetic elements of her work.

Biograpy. Kathryn Blair is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Calgary. She completed the B.F.A. Honours program in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2009. Her work focuses on the ways humans interact with technology and how technology mediates human experiences, using wearable technology and physical computing to explore these themes. She has been involved in the Calgary-based tech couture fashion show Make Fashion since 2013, and has shown her wearable technology work in British Columbia, the United States and Ireland.

Varvara GULJAJEVA. Beyond interactivity. The unsolved question of interactive art

The paper introduces an artistic research project that focuses on the extended forms of interactive art and aims to define new terminology for the passive and unaware participation ways.
Through the artistic practice, interviews with pioneer artists, related texts and artwork it is questioned whether art pieces that do not involve audience actively, but contain interactivity within the system internally can be still classified as interactive artworks. Since 2004, when Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica was awarded to a not explicitly interactive artwork there is a clear need for additional terminology. Definitely everything can be named as hybrid, but is this a long-term solution or just a transition zone?
The article discusses several proposals for the new notions like extended forms of interactive art, unaware participation in the context of interactive art, and also post-interactive art. The question is how we define these kind of works that are not interactive to its audience, but still incorporate internal system interaction with a data source. When one does not take the last fact into account, then from the audience point of view the art piece offers solely a mental engagement, similarly to a painting or a static sculpture. Extending the term of interactive art in such an extreme extent that one could potentially classify an abstract painting also as an interactive work, is a subversive strategy unless there are introduced new vocabulary that helps to define the internal processes of interactive system.

Biograpy. Varvara Guljajeva is an artists and researcher. Varvara is a PhD candidate at Estonian Academy of Arts. She has been working as a visiting researcher at IAMAS (Ogaki, Japan), LJMU (Liverpool, UK), and Interface Cultures in the Linz University of Art and Design.
Varvara forms together with Mar Canet an artist duo called Varvara & Mar. The duo has been exhibiting in international shows since 2009. Their works have been shown at MAD in New York, FACT in Liverpool, Santa Monica in Barcelona, Barbican in London, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Maribor City Gallery in Slovenia, etc. Often duo’s work is inspired by the digital age. In their practice they confront social changes and impact of technological era. In addition to that, Varvara & Mar are fascinated by kinetics and participation, which are integral parts of their work.

Vanessa Sonia SANTOS. Investigating Locative Art through a methodological bricolage

This paper presents the conditions of knowledge legitimation of a doctoral study in the Communication field that uses multiple tools of inquiry in a combination of art-based research and traditional scientific methods. The thesis, qualified with an excellent cum laude, gained remarking comments in reference to its interdisciplinary methodology, which crosses the boundaries of usually separated domains: Art, Social Science, and Technology. In a methodological bricolage, the study links theory and practice in an attempt to demystify principles in Humanities that tend to separate both. Though practical approaches at the Ph.D. level are something rare, what this study reaffirms is the relevance of complementary processes that associate experimental production with theoretical reflection. The author describes how these relations established between seeing, doing and analyzing generated a hybrid and simultaneous epistemological process of knowing-by-making, in which the artistic production became a form of investigating two interrelated areas. One is the design and implementation of communication technologies involved in Locative Art, what included a group of artists and researchers that collaborated in the development of a geolocation-based experience to augment the public space. The other is the manner that participants respond to distinct modes of engagement in an interactive experience, an examination of the phenomena that could be done outside the laboratory. The author focuses on this doctoral study to discuss how knowledge can be gained from the artistic practice when the making becomes an elemental mechanism to examine the experience of both, practitioners (researcher) and audience (people involved in the study).

Biograpy. Vanessa Santos is a digital media artist and researcher. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Communication (2017), from Pompeu Fabra University, with the thesis “Designing Mobile Narratives: discursive strategies and participation modes in Locative Media Art”. She investigates the creative use of mobile and pervasive media and its encouragement in the creation of new narrative genres. Her last work is Chronica Mobilis, an interactive and geolocated performance with gameplay, which happens in a public augmented space. Currently, she investigates the audience experience in response to different modes of engagement. More info at: https://vassportifolio.net

Vanessa GRAVENOR. Disassociate Reality

In our post-digital condition, realities intertwine with the virtual. Fake viral news merges with actual events and create happenings in reality. Exploring this merger of the digital world with trauma, the video series Disassociate Reality explores the entangled web of trauma, from terrorism, to historical cold warfare, using the post-digital aesthetic of renderings and 3-D animation to examine how traumatic memories are dislodged and liquefied. The project is comprised of a series of short videos formulated as clusters and using the logic of the assemblage to break down the notion of “viral” trauma. The project stems from the artist’s own personal experience with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder having been shot with an AK-47 on the night of the attacks in Paris in November 13th, 2015. However, the project is more broadly about the construction of memory and the fuzziness of forming both an official or personal memory. Through video, the artist has formed a narrative that shows this variance in trajectories. Starting with the background of Kalashnikov himself as an arms dealer and linking it to the proliferation of arms as a form of proxy politics in the Cold War under the Reagan administration. At its core, the video project weaves in singular accounts and then questions how the digital mechanical structures of reality breaks down time and asks us to disassociate the real: eliminate trauma itself.

Biography. Vanessa Gravenor is a writer and artist living in Berlin. As an artist, she conducts research on cybernetics, trauma, and psychoanalysis using video and installation methodologies. Her writing has been published by ArtSlant, Sleek, and the Brooklyn Rail. She was a DAAD fellow between October 2015 and December 2016 and is finishing her Diplom at the Universität der Künste, Berlin with Hito Steyerl. She recently was the assistant editor for the forthcoming anthology The Proxy and Its Politics: On Power and Subversion, Archive books 2017. Her bot/art trolling can be found on twitter @femmepicaro

Vytautas MICHELKEVIČIUS, Lina MICHELKEVIČE. Other Virtuality: Tracing the Real in Maps and Diagrams within Artistic Research

This performative and visual presentation deals with the notion of “map” and “diagram” within artistic research and aims to outline how artists and curators made diagrammatic representations offer a different insight into reality.
The map in its original sense is a primary form of virtuality. Being a conventional representation of a real landscape it simulates the reality and requires an imaginative input, yet at the same affects the real movement of bodies of those using the map. Nowadays geographic maps offer more and more immersive environments – take e. g. Google Street View – that allow to travel in allegedly real landscapes without actually moving. However one can claim that with increased technologisation, accuracy, and immersiveness, the imaginary element is being lost: as the virtual becomes too close to the real, our perception of reality becomes more and more uniform.
Focusing on several case studies, selected from Inter-format Symposium Along Lines (Nida Art Colony, 2017) and Vytautas Michelkevičius book Converged by Artistic Research in Lithuania and Beyond (Vilnius Academy of Arts Press 2016/2017), the presentation will discuss different ways of representing reality in diagrammatic forms, proposed by artists and those working in artistic research. Works by artists, such as Christoph Fink or Nicolaus Gansterer, offer subjective ways of tracing reality. Unlike the standardised maps and diagrams (geographic or other), such artistic maps can proliferate with new diagrammatic responses (see e.g. Gansterer’s collaborative projects with scientists, choreographers, etc.).

Biograpy. Vytautas Michelkevičius ¬is a curator, art and media researcher, and associate professor at Vilnius Academy of Arts. He holds a PhD in Communication and Critical Media Studies (Humanities) from Vilnius University. His doctoral dissertation was recognized as one of the three best social sciences and humanities dissertations in Lithuania in 2010. He has undertaken fellowships at the University of Vienna (Austria) and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Germany). Michelkevičius has taught courses on artistic research methodology, media theory, media art, conceptual photography etc. at Vilnius University, Vilnius Academy of Arts, the European Humanities University (Lithuania/Belarus) and Aalto University (Finland).  During 2013-2015 he was holding a post-doc fellowship at Vilnius Academy of Arts (Lithuania). The goal of the research project was to study ‘artistic research’ and contemporary settings of ‘Phd for artists’.  Since 2010 Vytautas Michelkevičius is artistic director of Nida Art Colony (NAC) (www.nidacolony.lt). Together with a team from NAC in 2015, he curated Lithuanian Pavilion (with artist Dainius Liškevičius) in Venice Biennale in 2015. Vytautas Michelkevičius has authored or edited more than 10 catalogues and books on media theory, art and photography in 2002–2016. Michelkevičius wrote two monographs: „The Lithuanian SSR Society of Art Photography (1969-1989). An image production network“ (Vilnius Academy of Arts Press, 2011) and “Converged by Artistic Research in Lithuania and Beyond” (2016/2107).
More publications https://vilnius.academia.edu/VytautasMichelkevicius

Lina Michelkevičė (b. 1983, lives and works in Vilnius) is an art researcher and translator. 2005 graduated from Vilnius University with BA in Lithuanian philology and Finnish language; 2007 MA in semiotics from A. J. Greimas Centre of Semiotics and Literary Theory at Vilnius University; 2014 defended her PhD theses in art criticism Participatory Practices in Lithuanian Contemporary Art: The Problem of Criteria for Analysis and Evaluation. Since 2014 has worked as a researcher at the Institute of Art Research of Vilnius Academy of Arts. 2005–2009 contributed to Balsas.cc, a journal on media culture, since 2005 has worked as a translator from Finnish and English and participated in interdisciplinary cultural, research and publishing projects. Co-edited books Mapping Lithuanian Photography: Histories and Archives (2007) and The Body: Out of Time and Without a Place (2016). A member of Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association. Research interests: participatory and collaborative practices, communities, art and education, representations of thinking, intermediate forms of art, communication and research.

Parallel Session B3. Tracing and Charting Migrating Cultures

Stefanie RAU / Greta HAUER / Jaana KOKKO / Ilva SKULTE and Normunds KOZLOVS / Mikko LIPIAINEN
Venue: The Latvian National Museum of Art

Moderator:  Oksana CHEPELYK

Stefanie RAU. Feeding back (or: And still we keep holding on to our spoons)

The starting point of the text is the occasion of receiving three silver spoons by my grandmother. They carry her personal history of migration, of having had to leave her hometown Riga at the age of 19. The text then unfolds into a contemporary reflection of the migration of people, data, capital and images.
I understand the silver spoon not just as a tool or a symbol but through its greater historic relationships of believe systems, value, trading and exploitation. The silver spoon serves as a metaphor that allows me to speak about different notions of ‘feeding’ and ‘being fed’, the role of technology and our dependency within a paradox media-materialist reality. To reflect about the a ‘virtual silver spoon’ then is a logical consequence of looking at my grandmothers gift through a perspective of computation and value creation.
The material both of digital devices and spoons carry similarities that can be drawn between data mines, silver mines and urban mines as a specific example of today’s nature-culture-waste-relationships. Throughout the text the image of the soup and spoon returns in order to circle around the development of currencies, its colonial history as well as image production.

Biography. Stefanie Rau studied at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and worked as an assistant in the Media Theory department at the Institute for Time-Based Media (UdK). Consequently has been involved in publication and exhibition projects such as the Atlas of MediaThinking and MediaActing in Berlin which was exhibited at Transmediale Festival 2016 and the exhibition Allah’s Automata at ZKM – Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. Her artistic practice takes the approach to think through objects, situations or places to unravel their histories and implicated cultural, political or theoretical connections, and explores writing as performative or voiced articulations. With her practice she aims to inhabit an artistic space in-between disciplines and is interested in offering different perspectives and critical understandings that manifest in the form of essays, lecture performances and essay films.
Currently she is finishing her Masters at the Critical Studies Department at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin.

Greta HAUER. Proximity Of The Enemy

In 2013 volcanic eruption caused the appearance of a new island in the Pacific Ocean – maritime set of an ongoing dispute between neighbouring nations. The rise of Nishinoshima caused the expansion of Japans Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – an area which stretches 200 nautical miles of a national coastline, allowing individual countries to exercise sovereign and jurisdictional rights such as the exploitation of resources. The Volcano Island catalyses the ongoing economic and geopolitical conflict of the East China Sea and its undefined borders. ‘Proximity of the Enemy’ (2016) uses various artefacts to reenact the sudden rise of the Island and its political and environmental implication. Outcomes are not contained objects, but rather a point of departure replicating the ridiculousness of a maritime dispute and the past and future of the island.

Biography. Greta Hauer (* 1984, Germany) lives and works in London. Her work crosses reality and the imaginary by observing and reenacting environmental, cultural and political systems. Through an extensive research into a place, condition and history projects result in the design of speculative narratives often presented in form of simulations, objects and films.
Hauer completed her MA at the Royal College of Art (2014). Recent exhibitions include All’s One, Roomservice Gallery NY (2016); Of The Sea, Chatham Historic Dockyard (2016) and Things We Didn’t have Before, Pumphouse Gallery (2015). Hauer recently participated in a residency at Villa Lena Art Foundation (2017) and Roomservice Project Space (2016). Next to her practice she is teaching at Goldsmiths University.

Jaana KOKKO. What There is to See (About Film, 24 min, 2017)

The idea of the film What there is to See is based on the relationship between an urban utopia and nature landscape. The film is a kind of chain of associations: The starting point for the work is the pioneer of romantic landscape painting, Caspar David Friedrich, a white European man. The romantic landscape, that was followed by nationalist and colonialist landscape, are examined in the film, for example, through a French children’s book by Jean de Brunoff. In the true spirit of colonialism, Babar the Elephant presents us with a utopian city in a civilized country.
These two key ideas form the basis of the story, and they are viewed against the background of a new residential area in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki.

Biography. Jaana Kokko is an artist living currently in Helsinki, Finland. In my work I am interested not only in the exploration of the expressive and historical aspects of art, but I find it equally important to understand and be aware of the fact that a finished piece of art and the act of displaying it publicly are political comments. She is Ph. D. Student at Art Department at Aalto University, University of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki.

Ilva SKULTE, Normunds KOZLOVS.  Hauntological Aspects of Steampunk’s Philosophy

In the era where terms such as ‘post- digital’ and ‘post-media’ are becoming the most obvious terms in description of cultural life, everyday practices and forms of communication the question rises of what kind of philosophical background can be used to better understand and interpret developing strategies and tactics of use and non-use of technologies by people. Some elements of program connected to use of low tech technologies as opposite to high tech digital technologies (e.g. mechanical vs. electronic devices) can be found in the aesthetic paradigm of steampunk – subculture with a rich history in several fields of arts including literature, film, design and contemporary art. Steampunk’s aesthetic ideology contribute to philosophical grounds of technological (de)modernization and hauntology as revitalizing of somehow ghostly retro-futurism of high modernity’s technological advancement.
In the scholarly literature of last decades, the term hauntology was called to life via passage in the “Specters of Marx” by Jaques Derrida who used it: “to describe a concern with apparitions, visions, and representations that mediate the sensuous and the non-sensuous, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, reality and not-yet-reality, being and non-being.” (Lincoln, Lincoln, 2014, 191).
Steampunk refers to hauntology as pro-active philosophy of Spiritism – one within various traditions of retro-futurism while hauntology itself remains nostalgic retroscpection of un-dead futures represented by the figure of ghost. Ghosts are located in haunted places and things and you can access them through certain spiritist practices (ouija board, etc.). Media technologies can be used to extend man’s perceptual abilities and note, record and preserve traces of haunted.

Biographies. Ilva Skulte is, Dr. Philol.,Assoc. Prof. has a doctoral degree in the history of language from the University of Latvia. Since 2001, she has worked at the Department of Communication in Riga Stradins University, Latvia, spendingthe last ten years as a Director of the Master Programme for Communication and Media Studies. Having taught and written about the history of media and reflecting on the changes in culture caused by new media shediscovered the importance of understanding how new environments cause complex changes in the system of cultural codes and practices including reading, texts, images, multimodality and media literacies (especially, digital literacies) in the context of childhood and school – the areas of research where some of her latest contributions have been made.

Normunds Kozlovs has a background in philosophy and sociology. He is currently lecturing at Riga Stradins University in the Studies Department and in Liepaja University’s New Media Art programme. His academic interests include counter-culture ideology and youth subcultures. http://riga.lat, http://rsu-lv.academia.edu/NormundsKozlovs

Mikko LIPIAINEN. The Potential of Augmented Reality Technology for Building Sites for Translocal, Transcontinental and Intercultural Dialogue: The Case of Digital Ghost of Resistance Monument Project

In addition to desk research a series of interviews and discussions has been conducted in three Brazilian indigenous Pataxó communities inquiring the history of Resistance Monument: a collective public sculpture by the Pataxós which was destroyed by Brazil’s military police while in making in 2000. Prototypes of GPS based augmented reality applications run on mobile devices and utilizing the gathered material are currently under development to be introduced as proposals for further collective, Pataxó inclusive and intercultural building of an online media site which would function in future as a focal point for fostering the public memory of the Resistance Monument and the accounts surrounding it that is currently erased from the physical public sphere and scattered as small information pieces in various medias. This process, called as ‘The Digital Ghost of Resistance Monument’ as its working title is also assumed to provide concrete example of digital technology application to be debated in connection to production of discourse enabling Brazilian indigenous ethnicities specific conceptual and practical development of technologies, as well as their critiques in dialogue with other approaches on technology. The presentation, based on two main observations: that the smart phone provides an important common interface for the Pataxós and non-Pataxós to connect spatially, socially, temporally and culturally and that the indigenous led development of digital technology related discourse is yet underdeveloped – perhaps caused by the lack of design and production side experience – proposes that the potential of mobile devices based augmented reality solutions is worth for further investigation in the context of intercultural dialogue in extreme south of Bahia, Brazil.

Biography. Mikko Lipiäinen is an artist-activist who´s work is mainly socially engaged and multi-disciplinary varying from community organizing to problematize gentrification, challenging art world and mainstream media to touch issues related to migrant labour through open source product design processes and reflect the discourses and roles adopted by media-activists through performance and participatory drama. He has been working mainly in Finland, co-designing and facilitating many local and international activities in a Tampere based DIY cultural center Hirvitalo together with its politically and culturally active public. Lately he´s been slowly developing informal learning and citizen science activities in rural Bahia, Brazil throught the experimentation of hackerspace form. Mikko Lipiäinen is also part of the organizing body of Pixelache festival, one of the notable new media art events in Europe.

PUBLIC KEYNOTE LECTURES

Ellen PEARLMAN / Chris SALTER
Venue: The Art Academy of Latvia

Ellen PEARLMAN. The Approaching Storm: AI, Biometrics, Big Data, Immersion and Surveillance

The rise in computing power is growing in tandem with enormous databanks of information, algorithmic processing, new methods of surveillance, and advances in biotechnology. These converging factors contain both obvious and hidden implications as both technologies of immersive entertainment, as well as technologies of control. Using examples of brain computer interfaces (BCIs) and her fully interactive immersive brain opera “Noor”, Ellen Pearlman will explore a few of the implications of these emerging and converging technologies for the future .

BIOGRAPHY. Dr. Ellen Pearlman, a Fulbright World Learning Specialist is on faculty at Parsons School of Design/New School University in New York City. She is Director of the ThoughtWorks Arts Residency, President of Art-A-Hack(TM) and Director and Curator of the Volumetric Society of New York. Her brain opera “Noor” premiered as the world’s first fully immersive interactive brain opera in a 360 degree theater in Hong Kong.

Chris SALTER. Immersion: What For?

With the increasing commercial take up of supposedly new “immersive”
technologies such as VR and AR, there is the sense that new forms of human sensory experience are just on the horizon – ones which are not only unprecedented but directly made possible by these technologies. The concept of “immersion” indeed seems to have overridden older notions such as critical distance, rationality or “reasoned” debate. Yet, immersion is not just articulated or instantiated by (predominantly) visual apparatuses originally birthed in Cold War laboratories and (now) Silicon Valley corporations – in fact, it seems to increasingly occupy all sorts of forms of sensory life: from art works, to health care to sleep. Immersion thus seems to be the latest in an arsenal of tools and techniques developed by our new knowledge societies to extract value from the last refuges of human experience – our bodies and our senses. This talk asks a simple question – namely, what does immersion do and for what purposes?

BIOGRAPHY. Chris Salter is an artist, University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses at Concordia University and Co-Director of the Hexagram network for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technology in Montreal. He studied philosophy and economics at Emory University and completed a PhD in directing/dramatic criticism at Stanford University where he also researched and studied at CCMRA. He collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe/Frankfurt Ballet. His work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Chronus Art Center Shanghai, Wiener Festwochen, Berliner Festspiele, Muffathalle, Vitra Design Museum, HAU-Berlin, BIAN 2014, LABoral, Lille 3000, CTM Berlin, National Art Museum of China, Ars Electronica, Villette Numerique, Todays Art, Transmediale, EXIT Festival (Maison des Arts, Creteil-Paris) among many others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010) and Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (MIT Press, 2015).

Plenary Session. Augmented & Virtual Reality, Digital Art Archives and Bio-Digital Games

Vincenzo SANSONE / Livia NOLASCO-ROZSAS / Kristin BERGAUST / Raphael KIM
Venue: The Art Academy of Latvia

Moderator: Ellen PEARLMAN

Vincenzo SANSONE. Augmented Reality between a philosophical meaning and a technological one. Some questions about the semantic shift of the concept of AR

The notion of Augmented Reality is not new. One already speaks about its theoretical and philosophical fundamentals around the middle of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the diffusion of an organised research begins in the 1990s, alongside the diffusion of digital technologies. The first researches about Augmented Reality are mostly of a philosophical nature and are often opposed to Virtual Reality, since, unlike the latter, AR overlaps virtual information to reality, increasing and not replacing it. In addition to the theoretical-philosophical slant, the initial devices were often laboratory experiments, too expensive to be marketed, though they had the purpose of letting Augmented Reality enjoy. Recent revolutions, linked to mobile technologies, have altered this order. The technological gadgets market has been invaded by a myriad of end-user devices, leading to a sort of semantic shift of the meaning of Augmented Reality. In fact, nowadays, when one thinks about Augmented Reality, it is thought in terms of families of devices, almost erasing its original philosophical meaning and creating a definition problem. The purpose of this discussion is to rebalance the semantic shift, analyzing the steps that caused it since the beginning until now and redefining with Augmented Reality not the devices but the original philosophical ideas and all the implications they determined. To refer to the devices, it is rather appropriate that the general word is preceded by the technical specificity (e.g. Hand-held augmented reality), because in their technical differences, they share the same intent: augmenting the daily reality with virtual information.

Biography. Vincenzo Sansone, master’s degree in Digital Performance at Sapienza University of Rome, is a PhD student in European Cultural Studies at the University of Palermo and Visiting Scholar at Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona and Polytechnic University of Valencia with a research about video projection mapping and its relationship with performing arts. The focus of his research concerns these areas: theatre, dance, new media, animation, AR technologies, software culture, urban design. He is also an actor and a digital set designer. He published some essays in several books and journals. He took part to some international conferences: “Bodies on Stage” (Paris 2015), “Presenting the Theatrical Past” (IFTR-Stockholm 2016), “Open Field” (RIXC-Riga 2016).

Livia NOLASCO-ROZSAS. Knowledge of the Virtual

Although the importance of temporary exhibitions has been on the rise due to the “curatorial turn” and the changing role of museums throughout the last decades careful preservation of the exhibition display including spatial arrangement, installation design, as well as the visual and contextual aspects of presenting information is not yet a common practice, although these aspects on the one hand would add to the history of the exhibited works of art, on the other they would document and preserve curatorial concepts, manifested in the exhibition space.
The exhibition becomes a statement, a presentation of ideas (Gedankenausstellung); it represents the cultural, philosophical or political standpoint of the curator and the institution where it takes place. It invites the visitors to take part in a thought process or an intellectual travel, while visiting the exhibition.
Virtual Reality could be a solution to ‘perpetuate’ curatorial endeavours. It implies the preservation of the scenography, and of the spatial part of curatorial work. In this sense these data sets could become comprehensive knowledge containers of exhibitions, where the exhibition’s accessibility is prolonged.
Artists are still experimenting with VR; some examples show that preservation of interiors has also been thematized. A few museums started to experiment with the production and publication of virtual tours, but this type of documentation is far from ubiquitous.
The paper attempts to bring up questions related to this field. The further research aims to develop a toolkit for the preservation of the exhibition display including the artworks, their spatial arrangement and the related information, which can be achieved with an analytical approach towards VR technology and the organisation of information within the exhibition space.

Biography. Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás is an art historian, curator, writer and editor. She studied art history and aesthetics in Budapest, she has been curating and co-curating exhibitions throughout Europe since 2006, focusing on the rapidly changing and expanding media of contemporary art and its intersections with various disciplines, with exhibitions related to topics such as economy, architecture, computer science or the question of perception. She worked as a curator at the Kunsthalle Budapest (2012-2014), editor at Flash Art Hungary (2014-15), has been part of the curatorial team at ZKM Karlsruhe (2015-) working currently on the thematic shows such as GLOBAL CONTROL AND CENORSHIP and Open Codes – Living in Digital Worlds.

Kristin BERGAUST. Oslofjord Ecologies: Experience, Artistic Research and Education

Oslofjord Ecologies is an ongoing artistic research project consisting of workshops, exhibitions, performances and publications. The Oslofjord represents both nature, economy, infrastructure, biology, materiality, culture and history as well as future plans and challenges. Inspired by Felix Guattari’s three ecologies, the project deals with ecological connections and challenges that are specific and tangible, as well as cultural practices and experiential interactions with the environment. The Oslofjord Ecologies project functions as a context for artistic research, documentation, research and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Biography. Short bio Kristin Bergaust is educated at the University of Oslo and at National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo. She works as an artist, researcher and educator. She is a professor at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design in HiOA, Oslo since 2008. She was formerly professor and head of Intermedia at Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts (2001-2008) and artistic director of Atelier Nord media lab for artists (1997 to 2001). Kristin is one of the pioneers of video and early media art in Norway. Her activity covers both international and national presentations and projects. Currently she develops contributions to the international network within art, technology and ecology Renewable Futures, focusing on sustainable and transcultural processes in urban and artistic research contexts.

Raphael KIM, Guy HANKE, Stefan POSLAND. Bacterial Candy Crush? Heuristics of Bio-Digital Gamification

Peering into a microscope, we are presented with an invisible ‘micro-paradise’ belonging to thriving microbial communities. With increasing accessibility of digital tools, this miniature landscape is becoming an increasingly shared playground, where we dictate some of the play through bio-digital augmentation: A relatively recent breed of video game, also known as ‘biotic games’ allow users to control, digitally track, overlay, and gamify micro-organisms using a combination of low-cost imaging platforms and open source programming tools.
Synechocystis spp. are a type of cyanobacteria, that are single-celled, spherical, and highly motile microbe with which its movements can be controlled using directional lighting. During the presentation, Raphael will outline his current progress on developing a smartphone-based game application that controls Synechocystis, and use it as an example to explore heuristics behind developing a biotic game: What are the practical and social considerations that need to be taken into account, and what are the potential implications of biotic games with the advances in technology?

Biography. Raphael Kim is a designer and researcher, using bio-digital technology as a narrative tool to explore implications of games development. A graduate and a former visiting lecturer from Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, Raphael is currently undertaking PhD at Media and Arts Technology, Queen Mary, University of London.

Parallel Session A1. Augmented and Virtual Reality: New Artistic Strategies

Christopher MILLER / Sandra ALVARO / Jānis GARANČS / Hanna HAASLAHTI / Natalia EGOROVA, Sergey SIMONOV and Daniil BAKALIN / Carlotta AOUN
Venue: The Art Academy of Latvia

Moderator: David SCHMUDE

Christopher MILLER. The Virtual Class

Depression arises as the inability to rid oneself of the panic induced by media’s infinite competition for our attention and for the attention of others- causing the subject to lose the ability to recognize one’s individual relation to the collective. As a result the subject becomes an environmental sponge, unconsciously memorizing, recording, and reiterating functions of others while utterly unable to affirm any acts of their own individual desire. Panic overwhelms the subject to the point of losing touch with the objects which in the past had been the focus of narcissistic attention or self-love. Constructed from the history of their persona, the subject GG Allin is a figure of prestige among the virtual class of the late 1980’s and early 90’s. He is quoted, “I want to make rock’n’roll dangerous again.” This implies that rock’n’roll was once a desiring collective, founded on transgression within traditional ethics, but has somehow come to an equilibrium in correlation. Allin wanted more than anything to be the plane which caused the collapse of the ideological stasis of semio-capital. The music, which was produced in a state of panic, was engineered to ride this erratic energy, this substance of sublime nature which posits a state of depletion among its patrons. The transmutation of this substance into music temporarily lends to the musician this agency of depletion. Taken out of the context of good and evil, transgression can be a therapeutic mechanism working to counteract the obsessional neurosis of repressive social mores. Transgression is the only mode in which Allin knew himself, a habitual heroin addict who gained some counter-culture prestige after repeatedly and violently shitting on himself and smashing his head on the wall in front of a crowd. Psychosis has the potential to create fields of action, which extend the realm of experience for both the individual and the collective – contributing to the conquest of human enterprise. It is in an artist’s ability to regraft this individual experience and posit it as an important contribution to our culture that distinguishes the visionary from the delusional. The heroin helped- it allowed for Allin’s unconsciously inflated ego to flourish in euphoria – even, as was often the case, when nothing of his empirical experience confirmed these feelings. Individuals transgress with the morality of the social in order to learn about themselves, and to reciprocally boast of this self-knowledge gained through the hybrid of frail conscious activity, if any at all, and the infantile unconscious opportunism of the subject of fate. This is typical of modern subjectivity, or simply the modern production of subjectivity and it’s inability to coexist with otherness. When the drugs wear off the exuberant self is dissolved and any motive of the will immediately bears the title of delegate to a matrix of lack. This detox is the only experience such a subject will have of its corporeal body, associated with the field of ineffable lack – all potential action becomes virtual and the subject will try, with all his libidinal energy, conscious or unconscious, to convince itself and others that this barren existence is all there is to know, repressing the entire domain of human enterprise in reduction to a shallow inability of a single individual to accept his own state of being. It’s safe to say that GG Allin found some sort of enterprise in his music, but it could never lead to the development of a conscious collectivity because all individuals involved are determined to lose their own corporeal existence. The creative development of this persona was a cartographic experiment in transgressive human enterprise but as it does not present itself as a bridge to the collective psyche, the persona and all the individuals who found solace in its withdrawn territory are no friend to humanity. They constitute a suicidal hoard of unconscious, faithless semiotic-nodes. It is human-beings as such which perpetuate mimetic individualism in compensation for an ability to know themselves. When subjects are alienated by a state of panic and overwhelming competition one might try and delude oneself into thinking that they have no relation to the collective whatsoever, even though by distinguishing oneself from the collective they become inseparably dependent on it as the only entity which can grant the subject a reflection. The individual who only knows himself through transgression with the collective attests to the existence of the collective while submitting to the order of the collective relations as outside of it’s own control. That being said, GG Allin almost caught the wave of cognitariat existence, as an individual who labors towards the extension of human enterprise but because he could not re-incorporate his carnal existence he only contributes to the outdated phenomenon of the American No Wave which is a reactionary movement to industrial-era alienation where the worker is out of touch with himself and the other workers, their interaction muted by machinery. In the contemporary, the workers have left the factory but the noise has only grown more insufferable- the contemporary subject must create intentional refrains to remove themselves from this infinite war on our attention.

Sandra ALVARO. Behind the black mirror

Behind the black mirror, there is not the emptiness of the cyberspace, but the transductions between the differentials of potential of a whole machine.
In 1962 Mort Heilig produced the Sensorama, this first proposal of an immersive system encountered soon the evolution of computer graphics, led by the endeavour of simulate reality in the controllable surface of computers. The translation of images to data packages coded by complex algorithms produced the interactive interfaces and the dystopian worlds inhabited by human surrogates, but also the training systems where the bodies and movements of pilots become data, which are sensed and translated to simulated landscapes of warfare. Rendering these data as images, computers learned how to read any image of our world as data. Computer vision and the pervasiveness of networked computing has augmented the perception of the everyday world with communication capabilities and digital information which is contextualised and delivered in real-time. Virtual and Augmented Reality had contributed to developing the systems that allow abstract our world into data readable by computers towards the constitution of a ubiquitous medium in which our daily interactions are under the commanding of the standards and protocols of unperceived platforms (Bratton, 2016). Postdigital Art (Bishop et al, 2016) goes beyond the interfaces to encounter the materiality of this whole machine and build critical assemblages, which can disrupt it embodying the computer mediated processes shaping our daily lives and repurposing them for the proposal of potential futures. This text will introduce new artistic strategies which take advantage of the virtual capabilities of these systems to disrupt the immediacy and real-time tracking and unveil a deep time. The complex processes from where emerge our current techno-social milieu and its capability for the design of speculative futures.

Biography. Sandra Álvaro holds an International Doctorate in Philosophy from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and is also a new media artist. She has carried out projects and participated in international workshops at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA and the Laboratoire Paragraphe/CITU, University Paris 8, and taught in the Roy Ascott Studio BA in Technoetic Arts at De Tao Masters Academy in Shanghai. She has published in refereed journals such as the Technoetics Art Journal (Intellect) and Artnodes and has participated in international congresses including CAC 2016 (Paris), ISEA 2015 (Vancouver), Re-new 2013 (Copenhagen) and the CR13 International Research Conference as part of the “Consciousness Reframed: Art and Consciousness in the Post Biological Era” series (Cairo). She also contributes to open knowledge and the spread of digital culture as a writer at the blog of the CCCBLab. Sandra Álvaro also has a BA in Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited in museums and cultural centres including Caixa Forum, the Generalitat de Catalunya’s Department of Culture and Media, Casal Solleric in Palma de Mallorca (Antoni Gelabert Visual Arts Award), MOCA (Taipei) and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Toluca (Mexico) and in numerous festivals and galleries. Actually her project “PostDigital Strategies for the Anthropocene is finalist at the Cultural Innovation International Award. Organized at the CCCB.Sandra Álvaro holds a European Doctorate in Philosophy from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and is also a new media artist.
Her research work revolves around the definition of the contemporary post-digital situation, with a particular focus on artistic production and theory, and participatory urban design. To this end, she studies the material conditions and social processes linked to technological innovations such as the Internet of Things, data visualisation, and digital fabrication. She has carried out projects and participated in international workshops at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA and the Laboratoire Paragraphe/CITU, University Paris 8, and has taught in the BA in Technoetic Arts of the Roy Ascott Studio at De Tao Masters Academy in Shanghai. Recently her project “Postdigital Strategies for the Anthropocene has been selected as finalist in the 2nd Cultural Innovation International Prize 2016-2017 held at the CCCB (Barcelona)

Janis GARANCS. Induced spaces as an effort of new sense/making – interfacing finacial trading in 3D/VR

This paper presents an interactive installation project, which is a part of doctoral research thesis. During the 60s, ,Marshall McLuhan, described the arrival of electronic medi the movement as the returning of humans from visual into audile-tactile space, to the tribal state. From the reality of the represented, humans are moving to a reality that is very similar to the given, except it is not natural. It is artificial, developed out of the represented. It is the induced; the next stage of the evolution of the interplay of reality, media, and the sensorium.
In the current and increasing mass adoption, VR allows integrating these behavioral and psychophysiological measurement with the self-reported descriptions of the experience in an ecological but controlled setting (Wiederhold and Rizzo, 2005; Parsons, 2015: Fusaro et al., 2016).
Noted by Keltner and Haidt (2003), a properties of percepted sense of awe in are shaped by two key dimensions: vastness and the need for accommodation. Vastness involves the perception of enormous and/or complex stimuli, such as a grand view (perceptual vastness) or a big idea (conceptual vastness). The need for accommodation describes how awe-inducing stimuli force us to adjust our cognitive schemas to accommodate them. The paper refers concept of induced spaces and ideasthesia as an effort of new sense/making, through series of experimental VR interfaces.

Biography. Jānis Garančs (born 1973 in Latvia) is artist, working in areas of interactive multimedia installations, Virtual Reality, and audiovisual performance. He initially studied painting at Latvian Academy of Arts, Riga, then continued education in video and computer art at the Royal University of Fine Arts (KKH) in Stockholm, Sweden and obtained Master’s Degree (2003) in Audiovisual Media, from Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne, Germany, where his focus was immersive 3D environments. He is currently pursuing in doctoral research programme at Liepaja University, Latvia. His artistic interest is in exploration of moving stereoscopic imagery in combination with surround / 3-D sound. The work often engages with concepts from contemporary theoretical physics, communication and evolution theories. During 2006-2008 also has been a researcher at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences (Germany), within research team of the consortium “LIVE” (funded by European Union) – developing interactive TV formats and production tools. He has been contributing to events like Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria), Transmediale (Berlin, Germany), DEAF (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), ISEA (Helsinki, Finland), IMCEXPO (Chelsea Art Museum, NYC), TECHNE’06 (Istanbul, Turkey) and exhibiting or lecturing at venues such as SAT (Montreal, Canada), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), Banff New Media Institute (Banff , Canada), ICA (London, UK), EXPO’2000 Hanover World Exhibition (German Pavilion), RIXC (Riga, Latvia) – among others.

Hanna HAASLAHTI. Cosmetic Space

How do we step into representations? Cosmetic Space is an artistic research project about our extended presence in simulations. For Sherry Turkle, “Simulation takes us further into our representations. We no longer need to keep the world in our “mind’s eye.” We build it, step into it, manipulate it. If photography is a new way of seeing, simulation is that and more: a new way of living, both a change of lens and a change of location.”
Cosmetic Space takes shape as an installation platform where people model a 3D double of themselves. Digital doubles then become part of virtual community, where their activities and gestures are controlled by realtime animation system. Social pressure is transmitted from the work to the audience, when people follow from the animation how their digital doubles treat one another and how this affects the relationships between the people watching the simulation.
It is impossible to know how much of us as individuals belongs to others and is being controlled by our communities. The structure of the work opens up this issue in relation to social changes taking place in western societies and the technologies, which operate as our messengers in the networks.

Biography. Media artist working and living in Helsinki, Finland.  My materials are light, shadow and human interaction. I´m interested in hidden structures which connect individuals to communities. The wavering equilibrium between individual freedom and communal rules takes shape as interactive installations, projections or lenticular images.
I explore gestalt psychology, computer vision, generative graphics and 3D-sensing in the development process of interactive spaces, creating ephemeral relationships between people, projection and space.

Natalia EGOROVA, Sergey SIMONOV, Daniil BAKALIN. The experience of interpretation of biological object in the context of contemporary art

“Marsyas”, a bionic sculpture, self-developing in contact with its external sound environment, is a research project at the intersection of art, science and technology. The focus points of the art & science project are bioacoustics, biomechanics and bionics. These aspects are based on the morphology of syrinx, the vocal organ of mockingbirds. The geometry and thrusters of the biological syrinx studied during the project are subject to transposition on a different scale, with appropriate transformation of environments and materials. Methods of adjusting mechanics based on evolutionary mechanisms (genetic algorithm and artificial neural network, developing on the basis of our bioacoustic studies) can lead to the improvement of the already complex architecture and kinetics of the syrinx. One of the most well-known forms of syrinx translations is aulos, a musical instrument of Phrygian origin, poetically reflected in the myth of the satire of Marsyas. Migrating from the animal world to the world of protoscience, to culture, and then erased from visuality (but “carried” by birds) and discovered again by scientists, the image of an almost perfect instrument of sound mimicry, finds its development in our project. We create our version of an already existing biological aerophone – birds’ syrinx acting in a different environment from the prototype. We consider it as a sketch for the existence of an organ separately from the body and as the intention to expand the boundaries of modelling biological objects. The project is implemented by a team consisting of an artist, ornithologists, an IT specialist, an expert in electronic devices, hydraulics, a specialist in 3D graphics.

Biographies. Natalia Egorova, born in 1985 in Petrozavodsk, Russia. Author of the idea and project’s artistic content. Artist, a member of Artists Association of Russia. The winner of Art and Technology section of Garage grant programs for emerging artists in 2016/2017, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Solo exhibitions: «Recensere», 2017, Galleri GRO, Jakobstad, Finland; «Direct Speech», 2011, Spider&mouse art space, Moscow. Group exhibitions and festivals: «Northern Paradise», 2017, Ilomantsi, Finland; «LimeStoneStories», 2016, Salon Am Moritzplatz, Berlin, Germany; «Rethinking Location», 2016, Kirkenes, Norway; Barents Spektakel 2015, Kirkenes, Norway; «Kalevala through the eyes of Russian artists» 2014-15, Museum of City Sculpture, St Petersburg, Center of Culture, Helsinki; Yanka Kupala State Literary Museum, Minsk, Belarusthe; Frontier», «Dust» 2012-2013, Laboratoria Art&Science
Space, Moscow; «The Shadow of Time», 2012, State Museum «Tsaritsino», Moscow; Athens Video Art Festival 2012, Athens, Greece; Media Night «Fathers and Sons», Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House, St Petersburg, Russia; International Experimental Film Festival «Vallecas Puerta Del Cine 2011», Madrid, Spain; «History of Russian Video Art. Volume 3», 2011, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia), etc.

Sergey Simonov, born in 1983 in Izhevsk, Russia. Author of the projects’ scientific content. Ornithologist, PhD, Laboratory for Zoology, Institute of Biology, Karelian Research Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences.In 2006 graduated from Udmurt State University (Federal State-Funded Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education), Izhevsk (Russia). (Co-) author of 81 scientific publications. Patents: RU 2501217 (20.12.2013) DEVICE FOR TRAPPING DENDROPHILOUS BIRDS; RU 2596890 (10.09.2016) DEVICE FOR SELECTIVE TRAPPING OF A MOVABLE OBJECT; RU 2618468 C2 (17.07.2017) A METHOD FOR PRODUCING A BIONIC NONWOVEN MATERIAL AND DEVICE FOR ITS IMPLEMENTATION. Organiser of 2 month courses of ecological and biological educational computer programs for gifted children. Member of the Organiser Committee of the International Symposiums “Dynamics of Game Animals Populations in Nothern Europe”, 2010 & 2014, Russia.

Daniil Bakalin, born in 1981 in Nadvoitsy, Russia. Author of the technical solution of the project.
Programmer, engineer, work experience in IT environment – 14 years. In 2005 graduated from
Petrozavodsk State University, majoring in Mathematics and specializing in Information Systems. Widely interested in information technologies – from web development to science (academic) projects and VR. Independently developed new information systems for Russian museums. Head developer for a few current IT projects in Jordan, Russia and Finland.

 Carlotta AOUN. soft-()-face: extra/inter/outra

soft-()-face: extra/inter/intra” is a speculative view on the rituals we enact on technological devices and interfaces and the mutations resulting from it. Technologies of all sorts are empowering tools that augment human capabilities (physical and mental). Nevertheless their fast evolution has also empowered them by conditioning our lives, interactions and behaviors with screens and interfaces. The space of person-to-person communication slowly dissolves into the immensity of cyberspace, gradually transforming into a surface interaction, an evolving simulacrum. The interface, by its form, representation and interactivity, makes a reality out of a world that is otherwise invisible, maybe non-existent to us. In this piece, I use latex screens as a paradoxically dividing plane, a combinative membrane, a sort of resistive barrier that acts as a second skin, a soft interface, a merging between our bodies and technology. Their elasticity and resistivity lets us see, metaphorically, the distortions of our body and psyche in the way it bends, amplifies, extends or flattens and combines our interactions. Tactility on hard-screens keeps us at the surface of the (infra)structure, at the first level of engagement with technology while algorithms and inner mechanisms become “deep”, resulting in an amplification of the gap between reality and cyber-reality. This idea is materialized by a screen with overlapping gestures that reflects the empty obsession –or devotion– given to phones, tablets or computers. As such, technology stands as a relic of our humanness.

Biography.  Carlotta Aoun was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1991. After studying Fundamental Physics in the Pierre et Marie Curie University (UPMC) in Paris and working with Elías Crespín as an artist assistant, she applied to the MFA Design and Technology at Parsons from which she graduated in May 2017. Her work explores the (in)materiality of what the common public perceives as unusual phenomena. Whether it involves spiritual, transcendental, or scientific experiences, she uses art as a medium to unlock the viewer’s mind to other realities, possibilities or dimensions. In combining fine art techniques with scientific experimentation and technology (digital and/or analog), she provides a visual or interactive perception of what is ungraspable and expands the boundaries of “scientific invisibility” to a broader audience.

Parallel Session B1. Digital Art Archives and Curating Practices

Janina HOTH / Aleksander KOMAROV and Maxim TYMINKO / Dijana PROTIC / Elke REINHUBER / Andrew Gryf PATERSON
Venue: The Latvian National Museum of Art

Moderator: Raitis SMITS

Janina HOTH. Digital Archive as Display for Digital Art

Digital archives (or databases) are an important form of preservation and (re-)activation of (born-)digital cultural heritage such as Digital Art. As such a digital archive is an important form, display and interface for the (re-)mediation, dissemination and co-creative knowledge generation of and about this art form. How can a database for media art be used as source for the mediation of multiple histories and basis for multi-perspective storytelling with and about Digital Art?
By discussing examples like the Archive of Digital Art (ADA), Rhizome as well as the online digital art market, the paper will explore digital archives as interfaces, displays and exhibition platforms for Digital Art, that employ different approaches in displaying and documenting digital artworks. Using the approach of data-based storytelling (Koblin, 2012; Ryan, 2004), which employs the database as cultural form (Manovich ,2001) and as a platform for co-creative and personalized digital storytelling, as well as critical mediation of art (Mörsch, 2011) we will explore different approaches and interface grammars of networked exhibitions such as the ADA Lightbox with the exhibit “CODeDOC remediated”, Rhizomes NetArt Anthology project but also platforms such as MediaArtNet as specific digital publication and storytelling formats that allow a contextualization, the networked writing and dissemination of multiple MediaArtHistories, and the creation of meta-experiences (Wiencek, 2013). A counterexample to the archive exhibitions will be walled-garden applications of online distributors of media art such as Sedition that offer mediated experiences and access to digital artworks inspired by business models of music and film business.

Biography. Janina Hoth graduated in theatre, film and media studies as Magister (awarded with distinction) at the University of Vienna with minors in philosophy and art history. After finishing her thesis on narrativity and identity in historical films, she began her work for the research project AT.MAR, funded by the Austrian Science Fund, for the Department of Image Science at Danube University Krems. Since 2016, she works for the department as part of the Lab for Digital Humanities, where she initiated a data inquiry on digital art festivals as part of her research for the Archive of Digital Art.

Aleksander KOMAROV, Maxim TYMINKO. PXFLUX an online platform and toolset for the exhibition, promotion, distribution and collection of time based, computational, digital art.

We are artists working in different media, making art which has no fixed form: shapeless and formless, like water, smoke or music. Our work is time-based, web-based, streaming, and broadcast in real-time. It is art that can be difficult to handle and display, yet is new and fresh and cool. Our goal is to find the best tool to share our work. A way that allows us to promote, collect, and exhibit it in its original environment: one of a binary-coded stream of electrons, displayed in a flux of pixels. We believe art should be seen not only in traditional exhibition spaces – like museums and galleries – but everywhere else, too: at home, in studios, and on the road. We want to live with art, share it, discuss it, and communicate with others about it.
We live in a fully wired world, surrounded by millions of cables, tens of thousands of satellites and thousands of cellular networks. For many of us, a computer connected to the Internet is our main artistic tool, one that greatly influences and shapes our creative practices. But does digital art really have a place in the established framework of the traditional art world? And can we apply the long-established system of evaluation and distribution when dealing with new forms of artistic processes? Do the museums, galleries,and art-spaces provide the support structure for this new culture of visual communication?
The nature of computational and time-based art is – by definition – variable and unstable. As a result, it needs a far more flexible and adaptive pattern of rules and tools for its life cycle.

Biography. Maxim Tyminko, a visual artist, born in 1972 (Chernigov, Ukraine). He is a co-founder of PXFLUX, an online platform for the distribution of time based, digital art (2017) and a co-founder of YourFavorites (2005) and Bolek & Lolek (1997) art groups.
Graduated from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM) in 2005.
He is an author of Bolek & Lolek Cosmos Constructor Manifesto (2006) and and opera-lecture Projector (2016). His opera project Beguiling Orpheus (2006, together with Gleb Choutov and Maja Ilic) received a Nam June Paik Promotional Award of the Art Foundation NRW. He is also curated number of exhibitions, among them are: -o-l-o-g-y (2012, Amstel 41 Gallery in Amsterdam) and Zbor. Belarusian Art Movement (2016, Foundation Izolyatsia, Kiev, Ukraine).

Dijana PROTIC. Exploring Curating Practice on Example of Media Scape

Today, curating practices of new media art still trying to find the best ways to present and preserve artworks. As Christiane Paul wrote “Collaborative exchange has become a fundamental part of artistic new media practice and has affected notions of the artwork and authorship, which in turn have fundamental consequences for curatorial practice and presentation of the art. This artistic process in new media creation to a large extent relies on collaborative models, which manifest themselves on various levels.” I will analyse early curating practices of new media, as well as relationship between artistic and scientific research practice on example of Media Scape. It was an international meeting of media artists which took place in Zagreb, once a year between 1993 and 1999. Curators, founders and organizers were Ingeborg Fülepp and Heiko Daxl. Media Scape in presentation will be analysed from several perspectives. First, through connections between presentation of art and technology, second as a significant event at that time with almost one hundred and forty artists and scientists. Third, from today’s perspective, in context of development of curating practices of new media and digital art. Media Scape is chosen because it is a very good example of curating practice. It has two parts; exhibition and symposium, it gathers and connects media artists, curators and scientists, and themes of each meeting were relevant in context of development of new media art. Today Media Scape still exists online as a small digital archive of curating practice of that time.

Biography. Dijana Protić, PhD Student, Doctoral study Publishing and Media, The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka, Croatia, dijana.protic@gmail.com
Dijana Protić has a Master of Fine Art degree in dramaturgy from The Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. In March 2014 enrolled Postgraduate doctoral study Publishing and Media on The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka. Her research and artistic interests are related to media art, visual art and moving images, digital technology and art. Currently, she is working as director on documentary film ‘Painters’. She is doing research for PhD, which will be about history and practice of new media art in Croatia and Slovenia. She has led several film workshops and authored several documentaries and short films.

Elke REINHUBER. Tangible / Intangible – the Digital Preservation of Yunnan Garden

This research explores the possibilities to capture multi-sensory impressions and to transfer them into virtual environments, exemplified with the forking path structure of the Heritage Yunnan Gardens at NTU Singapore. Even if immersive Virtual Reality appears as an established technology, meaningful applications for 360°VR are still in their infancy. Current and breaking technologies can realise their potential only if they are filled with ideas and utilise the cutting-edge enticement with appropriate storytelling. Stereoscopy and spatial audio enhance the experience in a substantial manner.
Other than the classic movie, the 360° presentation challenges the audience with the quest for the right direction, where to look in the surrounding vistas and this abundance of choices has to be anticipated by the filmmakers. Possible decisions open up for the viewer only while the author of the picture encourages to follow different paths through the narrative – like the grid of walkways in the actual garden spreads in all cardinal directions.
Capturing the tangible and intangible presence of cultural heritage sites and engaging an audience to experience and rediscover them virtually forms the foundation to investigate into a novel way of virtual representations.

Biography. Elke Reinhuber is not your average artist, because she became a specialist on choice, decision making and counterfactual thoughts in media arts.  Currently, Reinhuber teaches and researches as assistant professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at NTU in Singapore. In her artistic practice, she investigates on the correlation between decisions and emotions and explores different strategies of visualisation and presentation, working with immersive environments, mixed reality and imaging technologies. She holds a PhD from UNSW Art and Design, Sydney, has been invited to speak at international conferences and to exhibit her work in renown institutions worldwide.

Andrew Gryf PATERSON. Towards autoarchaeological archiving of artist-organiser practice – tbc.

This paper shares example of an archival practice developed by the author in mapping, charting and archiving his own practice in various locations and temporal periods over a 5 year period in Finland and Latvia. It is presented as a contribution to practice-based, artistic research methodologies described as autoarchaeologies. It faces an emerging research problem interpreting and making sense of the relationship between ones own practice-based activities and experiences in multiple contexts, over longer durations of time: How to present activities and experiences— that have happened as open-ended events and processes in multiple contexts over time— within the re-telling of practice-based research?
The approach builds upon earlier practice-led research in virtual, augmented and mobile media environments (2002-2006), and reflections on charting ‘artistic fieldwork’ (2011) connecting authorship in spatio-temporal data structures, and borrows from archaeological and geological practice of stratigraphy, which records inter-related strata (or loci in time-space) to chart inter-related contexts and durations. Autoarchaeologies supports the charting of geneologies in open-ended processes, relative development and coherence of activities over time.
In the context of increased meta-data-augmented documentation of practices and everyday life via ubiquitous mobile computing and online publishing platforms, there is arguably increasing amount of personal (small or big) data to interpret and analysis especially in the context of digital humanities. One archaeological theorist suggests, with access to multitude of data available about our own and others past activities, we are all (potentially) archaeologists now.

Biography.  Andrew Gryf Paterson (Scotland/Finland/Latvia) “Artist-organiser”, cultural producer, educator, independent researcher, based since late 2002 in Helsinki, Finland. Specialises in developing and leading inter- and trans- disciplinary projects exploring connections between art, digital culture and science, cultural activism, ecological and sustainability movements, cultural heritage and collaborative networks. What is left behind as social, digital, material & ephemeral residue of ‘being t/here’ has been a consistent concern. He has been closely connected to Pixelache Helsinki for 13 years, and completing his Doctoral of Arts thesis at Media dept. of Aalto University ARTS. More or less archived here: http://agryfp.info

Parallel Session A2. 360º Video and Interactive Storytelling

Aigars CEPLITIS / Luis BRACAMONTES / Adnan HADZI / Arnas ANSKAITIS / Oksana CHEPELYK
Venue: The Art Academy of Latvia

Moderator: Chris HALES

Aigars CEPLITIS. The Tension of Temporal Focalization and Immersivity in 360 Degree 3D Virtual Space

The fundamental raison d’être for the productions of immersive technologies is the attainment of an absolute psychosomatic and physical embodiment. The impasse, however, for audiovisual works shot in 360° space, is that their current schemata as well as their visual configuration oppose the very type of an experience it strives to deploy. To crack the code of narrative design that would render 360° films to offer a truly immersive experience, a number of 360° video prototypes have been created and tested against the backdrop of Seymour Chatman’s narrative as well as Marco Caracciolo’s theories of embodied engagements in order to assess the extent of immersion in a variety of 360° narrative setting, zooming in on summary, scene, omission, pause, and stretch. Such prototype simulation is further followed by testing audiovisual plates whose micronarratives are structured in a rhizomatic pattern. Classical films are edited elliptically, although cut and omission are demarcated in cinema, with cut being an elliptical derivative, and in favor of using freeze frames to pause for a pure description. In 360° cinema, in turn, omission, cut, and pause, do not operate properly; its cinematic preference for here and now creates an inherent resentment to montage. Singulative narrative representations of an event (describing once what happened once) remains the principal core in spherical cinema, with repetitive representations deployed rarely, merely as special effects, or as a patterning device in flashbacks or thought-forming sequences through the post-digital editing style. The repetitive sequences in 360° become particularly disturbing, when their digital content is viewed, using VR optical glasses, instead of desktop computers, and such contrasts answer more fundamental questions as to whether montage is detrimental in 360° film, what types of story material and genre are more suitable for 360° cinema, and how do we gage the level of embodiment. Finally, the residual analysis of the before mentioned prototype simulation brings to the fore the rhizomatic narrative kinetics (the fusion of the six Deleuzoguattarian principles with the classic narrative canons), that should become, de facto, the language of 360°, if the embodiment is to be the key.

Biography. Aigars Ceplītis is the Creative Director of Audiovisual Media Arts Department at RISEBA University, where he teaches Advanced Film Editing Techniques and Film Narratology. He is also a PhD candidate at New Media MPLab, Liepaja University, where he is investigating novel storytelling techniques for 360 degree Cinema. Aigars has been working as a film editor in feature films “The Aunts”, “The Runners”, “A Bit Longer”, “Horizont”, and on 20 TV miniseries “The Secrets of Friday Hotel”. He has formerly served as an office manager and film editor for Randal Kleiser, an established Hollywood director best renown for hits such as “Grease” and “Blue Lagoon”. While in Los Angeles, Aigars headed the program of film and video for disadvantageous children of Los Angeles under the auspices of Stenbeck Family, the owners of MTG. Aigars holds an M.F.A. in Film Directing from California Institute of the Arts and B.A. in Art History from Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

Luis BRACAMONTES. Teleacting the story: User-centered narratives through navigaze in 360º video

This research explores the possibilities of a user-centered narrative strategy for 360º video through a new feature called “navigaze”. Navigaze is a feature introduced by the swedish Startup “SceneThere”, and it allows a controlled level of agency in the storytelling that borderlines between gaming and film. “Teleaction” here is understood from Manovich’s perspective of “acting over distance in real time” as opposed to “telepresence” implying only “seeing at a distance”. Immersive storytelling for Virtual Reality and 360º video presents a new challenge for creators: The dead of the director. At least in the traditional way as seen in other mediums such as theater or film. As its frameless quality and highly active nature demands for a fluid and flexible narrative.
Navigaze allows the user to inhabit a story instead of just witnessing it. By including a space-warp feature reminiscing to Google Street View, users can explore the “virtual worlds” and unravel pieces of the story on their own by gazing at the blue hotspots that transports them to the next location within the same world. Thus, the story constitutes a series of pieces of a puzzle that every person can put together as they want creating a unique narrative experience, similar to Julio Cortázar’s game-changing novel “Hopscotch” (1963).
Focusing on two pieces by SceneThere, “Voices of the Favela” (2016) and “The Borderland” (2017), this research delves into the evolution of storytelling on VR and 360º video and the early stages of the creation of their own narrative language.

Biography. Luis Bracamontes is a narrative designer and writer, specializing in Storytelling for VR and AR. He is an intern in the Virtual Reality start-up, “VRish” in Vienna. And he is currently studying an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in “Media Arts Cultures”, between Danube University Krems, Aalborg University and the University of Łódź. He has a B.A. in Communication Sciences with a specialization in Marketing and has worked for over 6 years in performing arts and literature. In 2014, he was awarded the “Youth Achievement Award for Art & Culture”, an honorary award given to the most promising and active youths with an outstanding trajectory in art and culture given by the City Hall of Morelia, for the work of his production company “Ala Norte”. Since 2015, he is a member of the Society of Writers of Michoacán (SEMICH). In 2016, he worked as an innovation and marketing consultant in the VIP Fellowship by Scope Group and the Ministry of Finance of Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur. His recent research includes a paper on hybrid VR Narratives supervised by Oliver Grau, and a research project on post-digital archive experiences supervised by Morten Sondergaard, and presented at the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) International Conference 2017 in Copenhagen.

Adnan HADZI. after.video – displaying video as theory and reference system

After video culture rose during the 1960s and 70s with portable devices like the Sony Portapak and other consumer grade video recorders it has subsequently undergone the digital shift. With this evolution the moving image inserted itself into broader, everyday use, but also extended it ́s patterns of effect and its aesthetical language. Movie and television alike have transformed into what is now understood as media culture. Video has become pervasive, importing the principles of “tele-” and “cine-” into the human and social realm, thereby also propelling “image culture” to new heights and intensities. YouTube, emblematic of network-and online-video, marks a second transformational step in this medium’s short evolutionary history. The question remains: what comes after YouTube?
This paper discusses the use of video as theory in the after.video project (http://www.metamute.org/shop/openmute-press/after.video), reflecting the structural and qualitative re-evaluation it aims at discussing design and organisational level. In accordance with the qualitatively new situation video is set in, the paper discusses a multi-dimensional matrix which constitutes the virtual logical grid of the after.video project: a matrix of nine conceptual atoms is rendered into a multi-referential video-book that breaks with the idea of linear text. read from left to right, top to bottom, diagonal and in ‘steps’. Unlike previous experiments with hypertext and interactive databases, after.video attempts to translate online modes into physical matter (micro computer), thereby reflecting logics of new formats otherwise unnoticed. These nine conceptual atoms are then re-combined differently throughout the video-book – by rendering a dynamic, open structure, allowing for access to the after.video book over an ‘after_video’ WiFi SSID.

Biography. Dr. Adnan Hadzi has been a regular at Deckspace Media Lab, for the last decade, a period over which he has developed his Goldsmiths PhD, based on his work with Deptford.TV. It is a collaborative video editing service hosted in Deckspace’s racks, based on free and open source software, compiled into a unique suite of blog, cvs, film database and compositing tools. Through Deptford TV and Deckspace TV he maintains a strong profile as practice-led researcher. Directing the Deptford TV project requires an advanced knowledge of current developments in new media art practices and the moving image across different platforms. Adnan runs regular workshops at Deckspace. Deptford.TV / Deckspace.TV is less TV more film production but has tracked the evolution of media toolkits and editing systems such as those included on the excellent PureDyne linux project.
Adnan is co-editing and producing the after.video video book, exploring video as theory, reflecting upon networked video, as it profoundly re-shapes medial patterns (Youtube, citizen journalism, video surveillance etc.). This volume more particularly revolves around a society whose re-assembled image sphere evokes new patterns and politics of visibility, in which networked and digital video produces novel forms of perception, publicity – and even (co-)presence. A thorough multi-faceted critique of media images that takes up perspectives from practitioners, theoreticians, sociologists, programmers, artists and political activists seems essential, presenting a unique publication which reflects upon video theoretically, but attempts to fuse form and content. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6862-6745

Arnas ANSKAITIS. The Rhetoric of the Alphabet

Through practice and research I aim to reflect on the connections between language, perception, writing and non-writing.
Jacques Derrida wrote in his seminal book Of Grammatology: “Before being its object, writing is the condition of the episteme”. I am curious – to what extent a written text still is (or should be) the condition of knowledge in artistic research? Does artistic research in general belong to and depend on this understanding of science? Would it be possible to do research without writing? How then one could share findings and outcomes of such research with the public and other researchers?
Writing interests me not only in the context of language, but also from the position of handwriting. How did letters of the alphabet emerge? It seems they were shaped by a human hand. What would letters look like, if they were written not on a flat sheet of paper, but in simulated three-dimensional space? In an attempt to answer the self-imposed question, I have created 3D models of cursive letters and exhibit them as video projections. In each visualization an imaginary writing implement produces an uninterrupted trace – a stroke on the writing plane. On this digitally-simulated stroke – the projection plane – a stream of texts and images is being projected.
I will attempt to combine two sides of artistic research (practice and theory) through writing – a writing system as an art project. Part of the doctoral thesis could be written and presented using this system.

Biography. Arnas Anskaitis (1988) is a visual artist, a lecturer and a PhD student at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. He employs a variety of media in his work, but always starts from a direct dialogue with the site and context in which he is working. His work has been shown at the Riga Photography Biennial (2016); National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev (2016); 10th Kaunas Biennale (2015); Contemporary

Oksana CHEPELYK. Virtual Reality and 360-degree Video Interactive Narratology: Ukrainian Case Study.

The aim of this thesis is to present some Ukrainian initiatives developing VR and 360-degree Video Interactive filmmaking: SENSORAMA in Kyiv and MMOne in Odesa. SENSORAMA as AN IMMERSIVE MEDIA LAB of VR reality grow VR | AR ecosystem in Ukraine by supporting talents with infrastructure, education, mentorship and investments.
An interactive documentary «Chornobyl 360», created by the founders of Sensorama Lab, filmed in spherical view of 360 degrees about Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which was the site of Chernobyl disaster in 1986, is now proven to be in demand on the global market. The immersive technologies are used to change human experience in the fields that matter to millions: VR therapy research, healthcare etc. SENSORAMA is based in UNIT.city, a brand new tech park in Kyiv.
The company MMOne from Odesa has created the world’s first three-axis virtual reality simulator, in the form of chair attached to an industrial robot-like arm that moves in response to the action in a video game called Matilda. MMOne hopes the invention takes the global gaming industry in some entirely new directions. The startup debuted Matilda in October 2015 at Paris Game Weeks in France, presenting its device in cooperation with multinational video game developer Ubisoft, which created a racing game especially for Matilda called “Trackmania.” Since the Paris games exhibition, MMOne has had several big companies from the U.S. IT community ask to try out their chair, like Youtube, the Opera Mediaworks, world’s leading mobile advertising platform, Facebook’s Instagram, and Oculus LLC.

Biography. Dr. Oksana Chepelyk is a leading researcher of The New Technologies Department at The Modern Art Research Institute of Ukraine, author of book “The Interaction of Architectural Spaces, Contemporary Art and New Technologies” (2009) and curator of the IFSS, Kiev. Oksana Chepelyk studied at the Art Institute in Kiev, followed a PhD course, Moscow, Amsterdam University, New Media Study Program at the Banff Centre, Canada, Bauhaus Dessau, Germany, Fulbright Research Program at UCLA, USA. She has widely exhibited internationally and has received ArtsLink1997 Award (USA), FilmVideo99 (Italy), EMAF2003 Werklietz Award 2003 (Germany), ArtsLink2007 Award (USA), Artraker Award2013 (UK). Residencies: CIES, CREDAC and Cite International of Arts in Paris (France), MAP, Baltimore (USA), ARTELEKU, San Sebastian (Spain), FACT, Liverpool (UK), Weimar Bauhaus (Germany), SFAI, Santa Fe, NM, (USA), DEAC, Budva (Montenegro). She was awarded with grants: France, Germany, Spain, USA, Canada, England, Sweden and Montenegro. Work has been shown: MOMA, New York; MMA, Zagreb, Croatia; German Historical Museum, Berlin and Munich, Germany; Museum of the Arts History, Vienna, Austria; MCA, Skopje, Macedonia; MJT, LA, USA; Art Arsenal Museum, Kyiv, Ukraine; “DIGITAL MEDIA Valencia”, Spain; MACZUL, Maracaibo, Venezuela, “The File” – Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paolo, Brazil; XVII LPM 2016 Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Art Centre, Vilnius (2014); 16th Tallinn Print Triennial (2014); National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (2012); Gallery Vartai, Vilnius (2012), and in other projects and exhibitions.

Parallel Session B2. Neomateriality and Open Design, Sociality and Algorithms

Hanns Holger RUTZ and Ron KUIVILA / John-Patrick AYSON / Giorgio RUGGERI / Mitch GOODWIN / Paula VĪTOLA
Venue: The Latvian National Museum of Art

Moderator: Andrew Gryf PATERSON

Hanns Holger RUTZ, Ron KUIVILA. Aiming for the implausible: How algorithms come to matter at the margins of one’s attention

Algorithms that Matter (Almat) is a three-year artistic research project, taking place at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) Graz, and funded by the Austrian Science Fund. It is grounded in the idea that algorithms become agential in the co-determination of the boundary between an artistic machine or “apparatus” and the object produced through this machine. It asks how algorithmic processes emerge and structure the praxis of experimental computer music. Through a series of connected and reconfiguring phases of experimentation, we look at specific forces and materialities exhibited by algorithms that retroact on the artistic process. In August 2017, Almat’s core project team (Rutz/Pirrò) and Ron Kuivila start working together, preparing the first of four experimental iterations. OpenFields coincides with the beginning of the in-situ phase in Graz, and therefore it provides an opportunity to present our research while we are in medias res. Today a wide spectrum of algorithmic practices is found across all spheres of society, including science, arts, and economies, raising seemingly disparate questions of accountability, control, and aesthetics. Is there a social reality of algorithms? If algorithms are understood as enabling expanded relations, how can we have a bearing on this expansion? A possible approach is through a concept of architectures—architectures of space-time, architectures of sound, architectures of software, architectures of thought (Parisi). As Benjamin has noted, «Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.» Given such hypothesized states of distraction, perhaps they can be turned into tools of understanding these very architectures. As the complexity of algorithms increases, objectivity in their theoretical underpinning is becoming more and more impossible, instead giving way to data workers’ trajectories guided by “plausibility”. Plausibility, although it is pervasive in scientific research where certainty in knowledge is not available, has often been met with criticism (Brothers Grimm have argued that in order to deceive, you have to turn the absurd into the plausible). If we take the opposite direction, away from majority appeal, away from the centre stage to the periphery, we arrive at the implausible as a technique of interrupting flows and producing irritation (“something was going on”) in the corner of our eyes, at the margins of our attention. If, as Kuivila suggests, «the passage between systems will be as important an outgrowth of the research [we] are undertaking as the work within them», then conditioning the coupling between our software systems with a view to implausibilities will be instrumental to obtaining the kind of peripheral, “irritated” vision necessary for an artistic understanding of the sociality of algorithms.

Biography. Hanns Holger Rutz is a sound artist, composer, performer and researcher in electronic music. He studied computer music and audio engineering at the Technical University Berlin, and worked as assistant professor at the Studio for electroacoustic Music (SeaM) Weimar. He holds a PhD in computer music from Plymouth University, UK. Since 2013 he works at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) Graz and was member of the FWF projects “Patterns of Intuition” on algorithmic composition and artistic research, and “SysSon” on sonification research. His artistic work ranges from electronic live music to electroacoustic music to intermedia pieces to sound installation. In all his work, the development and research on software and algorithms plays an important role. He has created various novel open-source software. The central theme in the recent works is the materiality of writing processes, processes where the time in which a work is written by a human or the machine is interwoven with the performance time. http://www.sciss.de

John-Patrick AYSON. The Necessary (augmented) Reality of The Common (dis)Functional Object

Partly inspired by augmented reality apps which use the SaaS platform (Software as a Service) this talk/paper/presentation will delve into the speculative use of the app Augment by reappropriating its opposite function — drawing users/potential consumers towards the faults & dysfunctions of objects, designs & products — or purposely dysfunctional objects, designs, products altogether.
By providing examples of particular works from the pop-up gallery/show Erratum (2012) by London-based artist Jeremy Hutchinson (among others) this paper/presentation will appropriate certain images of artworks from Hutchinson’s show & recontextualize them from the diametrical opposition of how & why the lens of Augment would present them to users, if not potential consumers — or better yet, critical buyers.
Within a more recent, contemporary context today, in 2017, this paper will dovetail off the aforementioned — the opposite goal of Augment & the thought-provoking, if not brilliant disfunctionalities of Hutchinson’s works & other artists/makers— & conclude by presenting common, everyday (dysfunctional) objects, designs, products today — the (heavy) laptop, the (tethered) mobile phone, the common (hardware-based) app, etc — all of which will hopefully augment the critical capacity of the everyday buyer.

Biography. John-Patrick Ayson is an artist, writer & PhD candidate at the State University of New York in Buffalo; he is currently working on “Ice Cream / Jello / Yogurt ” for the Winter of 2018 – an art installation that addresses the crossroads between local economies in Western New York, globalized food economies & the Anthropocene

Giorgio RUGGERI. Tracing the Role of Design in Online History Platforms

What does history look like on the Internet? How can we transform historical data into online narratives and virtual experiences?
Design plays a central role in digital history projects, where content is mediated by visual frameworks. Despite that, designers are not aware enough of such field, as well as digital humanists often underestimate the importance of visual design. How to put these worlds in contact?
A selection of online platforms—from animated archives and interactive timelines to virtual exhibitions and simulated social networks—will be introduced with the aim to analyze and understand digital history through the lens of design.

Biography. Giorgio Ruggeri (1991) is a designer and scholar. After graduating from ISIA Urbino, Italy – a design university with a humanistic approach and committed to social and cultural communication – he enrolled in the MA Visual Communication Design course at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania, and spent one semester at the Hochschule Düsseldorf, Germany. Currently he is following the e-learning course in Programming for Digital Humanities provided by the Linnaeus University, Sweden. Ranging from graphic and web design to critical writing and editing, his practice focuses on topics around visual culture and history by designing and curating interpretative frameworks.

Mitch GOODWIN. The Liquid Electric – tracing nature’s machine code

Representations of techno-ecologies have a deep and evocative history embedded as they are within our most elaborate cultural fantasies and our most extreme scientific simulations. These digital media dreamscapes constitute the foundation principles of an emergent data aesthetics of liquid. Hollywood has codified this through an art director’s pallet that is often blue and luminous in tone, is found at the core of a film’s novum and often takes on a kinetic electrical form. It is as if these digital signposts – from Disney’s 1982 film Tron through to more recent ecological parables such as A.I., Gravity and Prometheus – recognize the very gothic anxiety we hold for our environment in the twenty-teens. A ‘liquid modernity’ as it were, bracketed by the twilight years of industrialization and an emergent century of automation and augmentation.
Appearing in all manner of image constructions nature’s liquid electric turn makes its most urgent call via the machine. Indeed, there is a discernible influence of machine vision at work here, and theorists such as Foucault and more presently Paul Virilio and Zygmunt Bauman have noted its ubiquitous rise. This machine presence is also strongly felt in the data visualizations emerging from the ATLAS observer at CERN and in the animations of NASA’s most earnest space dreaming. Here the liquid electric is presented as the source code – the host, the conductor, the origin material – of the human/machine interface. But there is something else at work here too; it is as if this liquid data – this coded luminance – is articulating a symbolic warning. Somewhere amidst these codified realities of remoteness and virtuality these mediated artefacts are reminding us of a great global unravelling.

Biography. Dr Mitch Goodwin is a media artist and academic. His creative work has been shortlisted for numerous awards including the Lumen Digital Arts Prize (Cardiff) and MADATAC06 Video Art Award (Madrid). He has exhibited widely including at the IEEE VISAP in Baltimore and the 16th WRO Media Arts Biennale in Poland. As an academic he has presented his research across a variety of disciplines including SXSW Interactive (Austin, TX), the AAANZ (GOMA, Brisbane) and at the AAS Moral Horizons conference where he examined the ethics of drones and autonomous systems. His latest project is a book based on his PhD, Dark Euphoria.

Paula VĪTOLA. Demystifying the network

At the time when technology is developing so fast and it constantly provides us new scenarios of the future of our society and everyday life, internet has become so ubiquitous that we don’t even consider why and how it has happened – it has invaded our lives and we have little knowledge of how it works and why do we trust it. The aim of the paper is to trace the beginnings and evolution of different ways of perceiving communication technology, and the reasons behind the metaphors we use to describe them. Since the rise of internet in 1990s we have been using different words for it such as cyberspace, superhighway, the cloud, the web, global village, network and each of those words has different additional meaning and context associated with it. Those metaphors help us to deassociate it from its actual technical content and the political and economical aspects of it and to perceive it as a something different – a place, a new world, a part of natural environment. The paper analyses these metaphors and their origins, and the way each of them has been portrayed in media and how it has affected our relationship with internet and technology in general, and how it can help us understand what is happening with the current situation when new technologies are being developed and offered us so intensively.

Biography. Paula Vitola is based in Liepaja, Latvia, and graduated from the New Media Art programme at Liepāja University. She is mainly interested in fields such as art as research, media archaeology, art and science, and relationships between humans and technology.
Her work encompasses experimenting with technology and nature, and programming and gadget-hacking. She has participated in different media art exhibitions and light festivals in Liepaja, Latvia and Europe.
http://paula.mplab.lv

Parallel Session A3. Augmented Environments and Data Aesthetics

Eva SJUVE / Jenny RODENHOUSE / Misha RABINOVICH / Tracey BENSON / Ludwig ZELLER
Venue: The Art Academy of Latvia

Moderator. Andrew Gryf PATERSON

Eva SJUVE. Creative process in augmented atmospheric environments and generative auditory systems

This paper examines the augmented environment and artistic applications of generative auditory systems. Generative auditory systems is in this research a mediator between the (un)natural environment, the machine, data ecology and the human. The (un)natural environment includes in this research the extracted data from atmospheric toxic substances to address issues and challenges of climate change. This paper is looking at the artistic uses of data, stable and unstable, and different aspects of applying this data for the creation of augmented environments. In this artistic research project, “Metopia”, in the context of urban sonic art, the aesthetics of generative systems and creativity are explored. Also, different aspects of augmentation in the context of data aesthetics, ranging from procedural systems to artificial (not-so) intelligent systems, are explored in this artistic research project.

Biography: Eva Sjuve is a media artist, composer and researcher. She creates interactive media technologies to reveal hidden structures in the intersection between data ecology and the physical world, addressing contemporary and environmental issues. Her work has been included in exhibits around the globe since the early 1980’s, including the Australian Center of Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; CAEIT Experiments in Art, Information and Technology, California Institute of the Arts, USA; The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Chicago, USA, and the City Exhibition Hall, Sydney. Her research has been presented at conferences, including the Internet of Things: The Philosophy 14, Hybrid City 13, MediaCity 10, Creativity & Cognition 09, ISEA 08/14/15/16, and NIME 08. She holds a Master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University. She is an Adjunct Lecturer at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm and is conducting her research in creative arts at CeReNeM: Centre for Research in New Music, University of Huddersfield, UK. http://www.moolab.net

Jenny RODENHOUSE. The Enchanted Forest: Satellite Canopies and Digital Understories

From satellite sensors to virtual reality content, forests are being scanned, replicated, and rendered to resolve our current climate reality and to escape into a entirely different one. Evolving into a complex system of entangled networked devices, media, and data, forests now extend well beyond their physical, natural, and conceptual bounds—into outer space, into the living room, and into a multi-layered environment that blends the virtual and the real, the artificial and the natural, the local and the global.
I introduce “The Enchanted Forest”, a working process and short film that investigates new ecosystems emerging from the alignment of landscapes, aerial observation technologies, and VR culture. Using a forest located in Sottochiesa, Italy, I will present the project’s experiments in finding and making alignments—combining documentary research, interviews with an Agronomist, satellite locator applications, popular VR forest environments, and speculative simulations—to generate a place that is sited within multiple representations, geographies, and realities.
Using the forest and film as a test site, I explore the construction of a hyper-linked ecosystem that appears and disappears with the passing of the International Space Station, our new artificial satellite moon. The project imagines how our landscapes, seasons, and internal rhythms might be transformed by technological forces, representative of our growing faith in the multi-layered realm we inhabit—the planetary interface. Through this project, I propose the creation of new hybrid ecologies of interaction and practice within the post-digital, Anthropocene era.

Biography: Jenny Rodenhouse works within the fields of interaction design and art. Her work investigates the digitizing of natural environments, the merging of technology and the landscape, and the digital interface as humanity’s new natural habitat. Appropriating the ‘test site’ as a platform, she creates sites of experimentation to prototype alternates—the other possible realities and cultural choices we have as we develop our technological futures.
Jenny teaches at Art Center College of Design in Media Design Practices MFA program and the Interaction Design Department, recently leading the Graduate and Undergraduate Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality Studios. She holds a Masters of Fine Art degree from Art Center College of Design and Bachelors of Industrial Design from Syracuse University.Jenny has been a Fellow at Nature, Art, & Habitat Residency, a Lead Designer at Microsoft Research, and a Postgraduate Research Fellow at Media Design Practices, ArtCenter College of Design. She has shown work at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, BODY and the Anthropocene, Architecture + Design Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Post-Internet Cities Conference (upcoming), The Graduate Center for Critical Studies, and KAM Workshops: Artificial Natures. Her work has been covered by The Guardian, Wired Magazine, Anti-Utopias, and Test Plots Magazine.
Website: www.jennyrodenhouse.com

Misha RABINOVICH. Shareable Biome

Misha Rabinovich’s current Shareable Biome project is rooted in a fascination with microbiome theory and Western culture’s recent adoption of the Fecal Microbiota Transplant (FMT) as a radically life-saving probiotic procedure. The rapidly increasing accessibility of this treatment is largely due to the work of the nonprofit stool bank OpenBiome. OpenBiome shared their data with the artists, which has been driving their artistic research, visualizations, and performances. Caitlin & Misha gave their latest expanded iteration of the lecture performance at Machine Project in Los Angeles earlier this year.
This lecture performance explores the radical probiotic procedure that magically transforms human feces into a medicinal fountain of youth. Caitlin Foley and Misha Rabinovich provide an overview of FMT in pop culture (Holy Mountain, Pink Flamingos etc.) and introduce methods for cultivating a diverse microbiome including a group meditation.
Antibiotic overuse can create a dangerous, illness inducing monoculture. Human culture is also threatened by monoculture run astray, for example the manosphere, the alt-right, etc. The ecological need for a diverse microbiome is a fertile analogy for a multitude of cultural struggles in which sharing communities play a key role. Our human culture greatly impacts the health of our microbiome and the latest research shows that the bacteria in our guts strongly influence our thoughts and feelings. Could FMT also help people better understand each other and the value of diversity?

Biography: Misha Rabinovich work  as artist and curator who create works which engage ideas and practices that involve sharing communities, livable ecologies, and the transmutation of waste. Among other things he create interactive games, installations, and happenings where audience participation is a key component of the work and its message. His DS Institute Sweat Battery actively creates/engages a sharing community through the collection of sweat from participants using their mobile sauna, presents an alternative ecology for energy production, and transforms sweat “waste” into power to charge cell phones and symbolize collective energy. His work has been exhibited in the US, Canada, and Europe at such venues as EFA Project Space (NYC), Flux Factory (NYC), the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival (NYC), Boston Cyberarts (Boston), the Torrance Art Museum in (LA), the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), SIGGRAPH (LA), Artspace (New Haven, CT), High Desert Test Sites HQ (Joshua Tree), Prague Biennale (Czech Republic), Machine Project (LA) and the Arts Center of the Capital Region (Troy, NY), and others. Misha is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Caitlin is part-time faculty in the Art and Design Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
http://misharabinovich.com

Tracey BENSON. Changing tides: Migration, Ecology and Deep time

I would like to present a paper on a recent project titled “Waters of the past” to explore some of the theoretical and practical contexts of that work. This project has emerged from a number of residencies in Iceland, the Faroes and Norway in 2016-17.
The objective of the project is to build a visual knowledge and language base from a range of media including DNA, photography, video and augmented reality. During my time in Norway in August-Oct 2017, I will be building my knowledge of the region, with a focus on the countryside around Oslo, Drammen and Hurum (where I have ancestral connections).
While in Iceland and the Faroes in 2016, I started to learn more about early language and the Runic symbols and alphabet. This interest is slightly disconnected from my main focus of water and water stories but has links to my interest in culture and storytelling. At SCANZ Mahia, I have expanded this work, collaborating with a Maori artist to create runes from found objects and then ‘offering’ them back to the sea.
My intention is to explore the iconography of the sea and natural environment as a juxtaposition to the runic symbols. For me, these symbols represent a culture and language lost as well as a ‘proxy’ for ancestral links to the old country. I see the reinvigoration of these symbols very powerful in regards to constructing a narrative about place, history and belonging as well as offering a link between culture and environment at an experiential level.
The paper will offer some rich examples from the project as well as putting forward some provocations for action.

Biography: Tracey Benson is a green geek/artist/researcher whose interests include connected communities, online engagement, sustainability, tech/art synergies, maps and open source software. Over many years, Tracey has been active in broad range of media arts communities: in 2007, she co-founded the Canberra chapter of dorkbot and a moderator on the internationally renowned new media list –empyre- from 2005-07. She is currently a Trustee and the Secretary/Treasurer for Intercreate – an organisation focused on the synergies between arts, science, technology and Indigenous knowledge for the purpose of exploring and responding to environmental challenges. Tracey is also a Board Director of Ethos GLobal Foundation. Her creative work has focused on the connections between landscape and identity. This has been realised through a number of umbrella projects including Big Banana Time Inc (1995-2000) – a parodic investigation of the landscape, tourism and consumerism and Fauxonomy (2007 – 2013). Fauxonomy uses source material of a factual and scientific nature, but by way of constructing a fictitious or personal narrative, the authenticity of the data is challenged. More recent creative explorations have utilised mobile and hand-held online technologies for the creation of virtual and augmented reality (AR) works. Interactive AR works have been produced in Dunedin, Auckland, Copenhagen, Canberra, Kochi and New Plymouth. The move to working with handheld devices has also coincided with an increased focus on working collaboratively with Indigenous groups and individuals to gain better understanding of the landscape we inhabit and to raise awareness of the environmental crisis humanity is facing. Her current major project Words for Water focuses on the humanitarian and environmental issues related to water. Tracey also utilises solar energy in her installation work, as an attempt to make electronic artwork ‘off the grid’. In 2001 she received a Research MA from Queensland University of Technology, focusing on souvenirs, nostalgia and personal identity. In 2010 Tracey was awarded a PhD at The Australian National University, which explores online communities and social networking tools. Recent publications include chapters in Mobile Media Practices, Presence and Politics and Locating Emerging Media. Tracey is a Professional Associate at the Institute of Applied Ecology at University of Canberra and is also undertaking postgraduate research on sustainability behaviour change.

Ludwig ZELLER, Martin RUMORI. The Institute of Sonic Epistemologies. Speculative Design and Sonic Fiction through Binaurally Mixed Environments

The Institute of Sonic Epistemologies is a site-specific, mixed environment installation that explores ways to convey a fictitious, ‘post-visual’ scenario: What if visual strategies lost their dominance in scientific data analysis against sonic techniques? What if blind people caught up with the non-blind in our information societies through their advantage in hearing? The installation stages a training class for statistical data analysis by means of sonification. Visitors are invited to enter and explore the space, however, the actual narrative is only accessible by listening to an augmented auditory layer provided by headphones. These are installed at different locations in the room, each of them allowing for a different spatial perspective combined with advancing dramaturgy. Binaural technology and custom acoustic measurements in the exhibition space are used in order to relate visual and auditory elements to each other while the augmented layer and the real space provide the same acoustic impression.

The lecture gives a short introduction to fictional story-telling in Speculative Design (Dunne/Raby 2013, Zeller 2016, Zeller 2017) by the means of material and audio-visual stagings and in consideration of binaural auditory environments (Rumori 2017). Subsequently, our approach departs from Holger Schulze’s (2013) and Pedro Vieira de Oliveira’s (2016) discussion of “Sonic Fiction” as coined by Kodwo Eshun (1998).

Biography. Ludwig Zeller explores the relationship between technologies and culture through a multitude of artistic and scientific methods. In his practice he blurs the supposedly clear, disciplinary borders between art and design. Ludwig graduated from the Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art London and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. As a docent at the Academy of Art and Design Basel (FHNW) he examines with his students the poetic dimensions of our data culture through audio-visual translations between analogue and digital domains. His personal research puts a special emphasis on the narrative qualities of fictional design artefacts and scenarios. Strategies for creating awareness and reflection of our status quo as well as the discussion of the relationship between society and technology are key points of his investigations. Ludwig has worked as a designer and artist since 2005 and joined the academic board of the Academy of Art and Design Basel in 2011. His work has been exhibited internationally at V2_ Rotterdam, FILE Sao Paulo and Rio De Janeiro, MU Eindhoven, Arnolfini Bristol, Barbican London, technarte Bilbao and written about in PAGE, De:Bug, Fast.Co Design, wemakemoneynotart, Beyond the Beyond and CAN.

Parallel Session B3. Anthropocene and Techno-Ecological Perspective

Anna NACHER / Maryna MAKARENKO / Michael DOTOLO / Vygintas ORLOVAS / Maija DEMITERE
Venue: The Latvian National Museum of Art

Moderator: Kristin Bergaust

Anna NACHER. Between “dance of agency” and distributed agency of techno-ecological artistic practice

The artistic projects in the field of techno-ecological practice call for updated notion of agency – the one that addresses “multiple modes and degrees of effectivity” (Bennett 2010: viii) of both human and non-human agents. Such need is often inspired by all kinds of contingencies and resistances exerted by non-human agents contributing to instability and unpredictability of result in the design process. At the same time it opens the aesthetic practice to the experimentation based on “sensitive encounters with material agency” (Pickering, 1995: 20), which, following Ludwik Fleck, could also be named “tuning” (Pickering . From the material metaphor of Shelley Jackson’s Snow (2014-ongoing) through Joe Davis’ bacterial radio (2011-2012) to Elvin Flamingo’s Symbiosity of Creation (2012-2015) one can see the process which inspires the question: to what extent the projects depend on the active force of non-human agents? How to account for their significant contribution in terms of auctorial instances? My attempt at answering such questions will be inspired by the Andrew Pickering’s notion of “dance of agency” confronted with the idea of distributed agency as theorized in the feminist neomaterialist approach, most notably Jane Bennett and Karen Barad.

Biography: Dr hab. Anna Nacher – since 2006 she has been working at the Institute for Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. Her research interests include posthumanism, theory of culture, media art, e-literature and ubiquitous computing. She currently pursues a 3-year long research project on the post-digital imagery (“The aesthetics of post-digital imagery: between new materialism and object-oriented philosophy”, grant from Polish National Science Centre).The author of three books in Polish, the newest one of which published in 2016 focuses on the locative media imagery. A reworked version of one chapter has been published as “Internet of things and automation of imaging: beyond representationalism” in “communication+1”, vol. 5 (2016). Other articles include: Mashup as paratextual practice: beyond digital objects (in the age of networked media), a chapter in N. Desrochers, D. Apollon (eds.), Examining Paratextual Theory and its Application in Digital Culture, Information Science Reference, IGI Global 2014; Stelarc and His Experiential Machinarium [in:] R. W. Kluszczyński (ed.), STELARC: Meat, Metal & Code / Contestable Chimeras , Gdańsk 2014. She has participated in a number of international conferences, including Transimage – The Transdisciplinary Imagining Conference (Plymouth University 2016), Electronic Literature Organization’s Conferences (in 2013 and 2015) and NECS Conference (2015).

Maryna MAKARENKO. Utopian gender narratives: reality of fiction in techno-scientific era? / JELLYFISH, film-performance

We entered the time of great technological possibilities transforming our future into now. No time like today is talking so much about future scenarIf the border between what can be defined as organic human and non-organic technology has already dissolved in 1985 with A Cyborg Manifesto as the proof of its dissolution we are definitely finding ourselves around trans-humanistic terrains. The unstoppable process of metamorphosis has began, and there is no point to question weather or not we are cyborgs or techno-bodies.
My work deals with the processes that take place in the realm of an identity formation specifically focusing on the notion of gender construction. Aiming to investigate the question whether we are living in gender utopia and what are its characteristics by using interview as a method of practice-based research interwoven with post-social anthropological practices. Interviewees are those outside of gender binary and cisnormativity: transgender, intersexual, polygender and everyone who can relate to genderqueer.
My lecture-performance presents methods of practice-based research evolving around notions of speculative fiction, post-humanism, anthropocentrism in times of techno-ecological acceleration aiming to place humanity on a map of post-modern mythologies.

Biography. Maryna Makarenko (b. 1990 in Ukraine) is a multimedia artist currently residing in Berlin. In her works she investigate topics evolving around anthropology, social theory, sociology of deviance, speculative fiction as well as visual qualities of matter and its relation to sound. After graduating with BA at the Institute of Journalism, T. Shevchenko National University of Kyiv I accomplished BA in Visual Communication at the Berlin University of the Arts. She was a guest student for the Integrated Media Program at OCAD University (Ontario College of Art and Design) in Toronto. Currently enrolled at Master Programm in Art and Media at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Michael DOTOLO. Aesthetics in Yoga

Yoga is perhaps one of the greatest cultural exports of India to date. It has gained popularity across the world as a form of physical well-being, but this is only a small part of an ancient system of philosophy and actions designed to facilitate an individual’s awareness. As a science of experience, yoga consists of a multiplicity of techniques for understanding the dynamics of mind and body. This understanding is a manifestation of awareness, achieved by means of a concentration through practice, and eventually, a disciplined approach to an aesthetic experience.
Through comparative analysis of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali to the four moments of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement, I suggest, not only a correlation between modern and ancient philosophical perspectives of the aesthetic experience, but a simple application of yogic techniques for developing this experience. The type-of concentration that is required for focus on an external object, demands a degree of self-awareness in observing and controlling one’s mental activity. Through observation, and the quieting of chattering mental activity, including one’s sense of ego, objects can be viewed purely in terms of their characteristics–form, structure, etc. This observation resembles Immanuel Kant concept of Purposiveness, in which cognition is balance sensorial awareness. The relationship between self-awareness and the aesthetic experience is inextricably linked and, quite possibly, as intimate a state in which the mind can comprehend. My intent is to introduce methods for developing an awareness of aesthetic and self, for the practicing yogin, devote aesthetician, or artist.

Biography. Michael Dotolo is an educator, musician, artist, and designer, working in the mediums of light and sound. His performance, installation, and technically-inclined freelance work has been created and displayed on three continents. His interest is developing work that re-introduces nature’s process to synthetic environments. After studying music composition and sound technology in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the 90’s, he pursued his interest of technology, art, and music at Brooklyn College and then later at the Frank Mohr Instituut in Holland. Following his MFA studies he began teaching in Mumbai, India. He is currently a program director for the department of Communications Design at Pearl Academy, New Delhi. Since 2002, he has been an active practitioner of yoga. A practice which culminated in an intensive and holistic training at the Yoga Institute in Mumbai. Yoga, as a science of experience with practical applications, resonated with his artistic disposition which was shaped years earlier by his composition mentor, David Dunn, in Santa Fe.

Vygintas ORLOVAS. Anti-ecology of digital sounds: a case analysis of Vaporwave

The attempts to recycle, up-cycle and reuse lead to less production of waste in the material case. However, laws and mechanics far different from this can be seen if we analyze the virtual and digital cases.
The appropriation of sound in the production process of music has been prominent in many genre after the sampler was invented and this phenomenon has gained even greater importance after the world wide web started to function.
A post-digital approach towards music production yields results that might be unexpected and are contrary to what we can analyze in the material cases of environmental movements.
By analyzing the cases of albums such as Floral Shoppe by Macintosh PLUS and flavorWave TURBO by Bigaku Aesthetics we can see that: through the adaptation of John Oswald’s plunderphonics the producers of the genre known as vaporwave push the differences between the material and digital to its’ boundaries and turn the strategies and ideas of a greener and cleaner world inside out in order to create a shift towards an anti-capitalist movement, which produces more than it is possible to consume. Furthermore, this aim becomes manageable only through incorporating the qualities of the virtual in the process of music production.

Biography. Vygintas Orlovas is a lecturer in and doctorate level student in Vilnius Academy of Arts. The main object of analysis in his creative practice is the translation and transformation processes involved in the shift from one media to another primarily focusing on the relations of sound and image. He has been exhibiting his works and performing since 2009 in Lithuania and abroad (Latvia, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Japan, U.S.). Similarily as in his creative practice Orlovas focuses his scholarly research on various aspects of the relations of sound and image and the transformation processes involved in the change of media. He has been reading papers in conferences since 2014.

Maija DEMITERE. Data vizualizations – using slow media art to promote deep sustainability

This paper presents aspects of my artistic research which is a work in progress investigating a new concept of deep sustainability. Slow media art,which is the subject of this paper, is presented as a complementary characteristics of deep sustainability, offering a view of lifestyle changes. In my research and in this paper I’m analyzing such authors as Deleuze and Guattari.
Data from two art works offers the possibility to seek patterns, that otherwise would not be visible. My collected food and food production data since year 2014, allows to build a model system that could apply to everyone – calculating how big area is necessary to grow needed food for one individual, what things they should grow to become self-sustainable (able to supply themselves with the necessary food, avoiding waste production). Visualizing the data such as food, it becomes possible to identify what kind of lifestyle changes are possible, for example, to reduce surplus and waste.

Biography. I’m a doctoral student at Liepaja University New Media Art programme.  For almost 2 years now I’ve worked in Liepaja University Art Research Laboratory (MPLab) as project manager. My interests are – slow media art, deep sustainability, self-sustainability, food production, ecology.

CLOSING SESSION

Open Fields Book Review by Authors
Venue: The Latvian National Museum of Art

– “From New Tendencies to FIELDS. Tribute to Armin” BookPresentations:
“RENEWABLE FUTURES” (Acoustic Space Vol. 16, RIXC, 2017) / “New Tendencies” (MIT, 2016)
– Book-Presentations by Authors (Pecha Kucha format – OPEN PARTICIPATION for conference speakers, if you want to present your book, please apply rixc@rixc.org)
– Closing Announcement: What’s Next?
RENEWABLE FUTURES 2018: Hybrid Lab Conference & Leonardo Symposium in Helsinki, Finland, introduced by Lily DIAZ / Aalto University.

Satellite Event and Evening Program

Venue: SDV Artist Residency, Doma laukums 2

18.00 – SDV Arts and Science Foundation & Garage Museum (RU) presents: Portfolio Review

20.00 – Cocktail Reception (free admission, places are limited, 40 invitations will be available on a registration desk)

Venue: SDV Artist Residency, Doma laukums 2