VIRTUALITIES AND REALITIES

• 28th September 2017
• festival2017

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.