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