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