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