2-DAY "OPEN FIELDS" CONFERENCE, 6 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS, 80 PRESENTATIONS, 3 EXHIBITIONS, PERFORMANCES, AND JUST 140 AVAILABLE SEATS
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.