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Science and Technology in Cultural Context

DAW07 Symposium Schedule

Last update: December 30, 2017, at 09:18 PM

Cabled Madness & The Beyond

Tuesday, July 10

SPECIAL OPENING DAY: "Cabled Madness" with Prof. Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum

Location: Auditorium Maximum

10:00-11:00	Registration (in front of Auditorium Maximum)
10:30-11:00	Reception with Coffee
11:00-11:15	Introduction "Cabled Madness / Science", Jürg Gutknecht, ETH Zurich
11:15-12:00	Keynote Address, Joseph Weizenbaum
Lunch Break
13:30-17:00	Digital Parcours → Detailed Parcours Programme
18:00-18:15	Introduction "Cabled Madness / Arts", Art Clay, ETH Zurich
18:15-19:00	Talk "Twelve Road Blocks – A Look behind the Curtain of Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work", Peter Haas and Silvia Holzinger, Il Mare Film (→ www.ilmarefilm.org / English → www.ilmarefilm.org / German)
19:00-20:20	Film Presentation "Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work" by Peter Haas and Silvia Holzinger
20:30-21:45	Film Presentation "8bit" Docu-Film by Marcin Ramocki & Justin Strawhand on art and video games

Wednesday, July 11

Note: Morning programme (workshops) is found → here.

TALK BLOCK 1: "Space Invaders: Not Arts and Hacktics in a Digital Age''

Location: VisDome

13:00-14:00	Registration
13:00-14:00	Poster Session 1
	"A Dynamic Concept Base: A Component for Generative Systems", Shigeki Amitani and Ernest Edmonds, University of Technology Sydney
	"His Master's Voice", Manfred Kroboth
	"Sound - Color - Space", Marco Feriencik, Stefan Müller Arisona, Silke Lang, ETH Zurich, and Natalia Sidler, HMT Zurich
	"Mini Sound Modules for Installation & Performance", Joshua Rosenstock, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
	"AudioTagger: Wireless Phonography", Eva Sjuve, University of Plymouth
	"We are Legion Changing Rooms", Leon Tan, Antti Sakari Saario and Amanda Newall, The Hollywoods
	"Hearing Sirens", Cathy Van Eck, University of Leiden
	"Robotcowboy", Daniel Wilcox and Oscar Ramos
14:00-14:15	Introduction: Will Pappenheimer, Pace University
14:15-15:00	Keynote "When Artists and Designers Mess Around with “living” Technology", Régine Debatty, we-make-money-not-art
15:00-15:15	Questions Debatty
15:15-15:45	Talk "DYI: A Militant Embrace of Technology", Marcin Ramocki
15:45-16:15	Talk "Camouflaging the Beast (The No-Nerd Hackativist)", Johnny Golding, University of Greenwich
16:15-16:45	Talk "Blog Around the Clock", Nils Röller, HGKZ
16:45-17:00	Questions Ramocki, Golding, Röller
17:00-17:45	Panel "Punk, Hactivism and Do-It-Yourself Intervention"
	Chair: Will Pappenheimer
	Participants: Régina Debatty, John deVries, Johnny Golding, Marcin Ramocki

Thursday, July 12

TALK BLOCK 2: "Designing Space and Composing Content"

Location: VisDome

09:00-09:30	Registration and Coffee
09:30-09:45	Introduction: Stefan Müller Arisona, ETH Zurich
09:45-10:30	Keynote "Interactive Spaces", Jeffrey Huang, EPF Lausanne
10:30-10:45	Questions Huang
10:45-11:15	Talk "Designing a System for Supporting the Process of Making a Video Sequence", Shigeki Amitani and Ernest Edmonds, University of Technology Sydney
11:15-11:45	Talk "Real-time Multimedia Composition using LUA", Wesley Smith and Graham Wakefield, University of California, Santa Barbara
11:45-12:15	Talk "Enter the Core: Live Visuals Techniques Exposed", Simon Schubiger and Matthias Specht, Corebounce
12:15-12:30	Questions Amitani, Smith/Wakefield, Schubiger/Specht
Lunch Break

TALK BLOCK 3: "Digital Puppetry: No Strings Attached?"

Location: VisDome

13:30-14:30	Poster Session 2
	"Panoramic Art in Real Time", Philipp Bönhof and Sven Stauber, ETH Zurich
	"MacchinaPerTracciare - Interactive Installation", Ruben Coen Cagli, University of Napoli
	"The Institute of Unnecessary Research - Art/Science/Technology Interaction and Socially Engaged Performance", Anna Dumitriu, University of Brighton
	"Robot Aitu: An Attempt to make Wave Emissions of Mobile Phones Perceptible", Lucas Gross, HGK FHNW
	"Un Message Evidemment", Robert Lawrence, University of South Florida
	"SQEAK: A Mobile Multi Platform Phone and Networks Gesture Sensor", Dennis Majoe, Stefan Müller Arisona, Art Clay, ETH Zurich, and Simon Schubiger, Swisscom Innovations
14:30-14:40	Introduction: Stefan Müller Arisona, ETH Zurich
14:40-15:00	Talk "The Reconceptualization of the Puppets Theatre Performance in the Digital Domain", Adriano Solidoro, University of Milan Bicocca
15:00-15:20	Talk "Anthropocentrism and the Staging of Robots", Louis-Philippe Demers, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and Jana Horakova, Masaryk University
15:20-15:30	Questions Solidoro and Demers / Horakova
15:30-15:50	Talk "CoPuppet: Collaborative Interaction in Virtual Puppetry", Semi Ryu, Virginia Commonwealth University and Stefano Faralli, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
15:50-16:10	Talk "Experiments in Digital Puppetry: Video Hybrids in Apple's Quartz Composer", Ian Grant, Thames Valley University
16:10-16:20	Questions Ryu / Faralli, Grant
Break
16:20-17:00	Panel "Expressive Speech, Gesture and Interaction in the Context of Puppetry"
	Chair: Stefan Müller Arisona
	Participants: Louis-Philippe Demers, Manfred Kroboth, Dennis Majoe, Semi Ryu

Friday, July 13

TALK BLOCK 4: "Take hold and participate: From DIY to Networked Performance"

Location: VisDome

09:00-09:30	Registration and Coffee
09:30-09:45	Introduction: Michelle Riel, turbulence.org
09:45-10:30	Keynote "Participation and the Networked_Performance Blog", Helen Thorington & Michelle Riel, turbulence.org
10:30-10:45	Questions Thorington & Riel
10:45-11:05	Talk "Tuning in Rorschach Maps", Will Pappenheimer, Pace University
11:05-11:25	Talk "Imaging Place: Globalization and Immersive Media", John Craig Freeman, Emerson College
11:25-11:45	Talk "The Maintenance of a Terminal", Franziska Lamprecht & Hajoe Moderegger, eteam
11:45-12:30	Panel "Re-Charting Reason: Remapping Public, Informational and Social Spaces"
	Chair: Michelle Riel
	Participants: Helen Thorington, Franziska Lamprecht & Hajoe Moderegger, John Craig Freeman, Villö Huszai, Sachiko Hayashi
Lunch Break

TALK BLOCK 5: "Artists in Labs: Puzzles in Process: Interfacing Art & Science"

Location: VisDome

14:00-14:05	Introduction, Jill Scott, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich, HGKZ
14:05-14:45	Overview of the Swiss AIL participants for 2007 and presentation of the labs for 2008
	Moderator: Irène Hediger, HGKZ
	Dirk Fengels, CSEM Alpnach / Peter Lang, Artist
	Daniel Bisig, University of Zurich / Pablo Ventura, Artist
	Angelika Hilbeck, ETH Zurich / Hina Strüver and Matthias Wüthrich, Artist
	Fritz Gassmann, Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, Villingen / Roman Keller, Artist
14:45-15:15	Keynote "Why Art-Science Collaboration Matters", Roger Malina, CNRS Marseille
Break
15:30-16:10	Panel I - Midway Discussion
	Chair: Roger Malina / Technology
	Participants: Daniel Bisig and Pablo Ventura, Dirk Fengels and Peter Lang
16:10-16:50	Panel II - Midway Discussion
	Chair: Karin Salm / Natural Sciences
	Participants: Corinne Hodel and Jill Scott, Angelika Hilbeck and Hina Strüver, Fritz Gassmann and Roman Keller
Break
17:10-18:00	Process-oriented round table discussions
	Innovation processes and outcomes (Monitor: Pablo Ventura)
	Representative ethical results (Monitor: Roman Keller)
	New languages and emergence (subjective versus objective) (Monitor: Irène Hediger)

---

Abstracts:

Keynote Address

Joseph Weizenbaum

In 1972 I published a paper under the title: On the Impact of the Computer on Society (Science, Vol. 176, Issue 4035, pp. 609 - 614, May 1972). Four years later the Book: Computer Power and Human Reason - From Judgment to Calculation (Freeman, San Francisco 1976). Years later, I began to have second thoughts about the titles of both works. Yes, the computer had enormous impact on societies world wide. But it became ever clearer to me that the very shaping of computers, the very manner of their development and refinement, the actual purposes, ex and implicit, for which they were created, that all of these were determined by the values of the societies in which they were imbedded, My paper should have been On the Impact of Society on the Computer and not the other way around. The main thesis of the paper should have been that science and the technology are not value free, that both inherit their values from the society in which they are imbedded. Insane societies produce insane ideas and corresponding instruments. Warier societies produce weapons, and, in our time, weapons of mass destruction.

As for the Book: Its subtitle, it is now clear to me, should have been its main title. For now, obviously, judgment in human affairs has been and is increasingly replaced by calculation. The largely self appointed deep thinkers of our time preach that all aspects of reality are computable. Things are "figured out". Parameters are optimized, strategies computed. Human beings are said to be "merely" machines whose fates are anyway determined by the natural laws that the physicists teach the neurologists, they the behavioral scientists and they, in turn, those who say they are philosophers. And all of them compute. They cannot do otherwise, for concepts such as wisdom, dignity, will, respect, kindness love and joy and grief simply do not exist in their universes of discourse. They are not measurable, not computable, not part of their vocabulary and hence not of their reality. What remains for them IS indeed calculable. The fundamental dogma of our time is that to understand a thing is to be able to program it ... finally to simulate it in the form of a computer model. Then, truly, the intelligent robot becomes the ideal of what it means to be human.

If the above is true, then, a question becomes of enormous relevance to our time: what should be the highest priority of formal education, independent of whether in the schools or in so-called higher education? It is a matter of utmost importance, for whenever something new is to be inserted into a curriculum, something already there has to be reduced or eliminated. It is a question of what, in education, is more important than what else. For example, how much more important, if at all, is it to teach the writing of computer programs as opposed to teaching the history of one's homeland?

The answer to the central question is, it seems to me, obvious and true for all places and all times: the first priority of formal education is to educate students to master their own language, to give them the ability to clearly articulate their thoughts in speech as well as in writing ... and that also implies to be able to listen and to read, to critically interpret the vast flood of signals that constantly impinge on all of us. I want to emphasize the distinction between hearings and listening, namely that hearing is largely passive while listening involves thinking and judgment. Absent this ability, as I believe it to be in very large parts of our people, condemns the afflicted to a life of servitude to the clichés, half-truths and lies served up by the overwhelming majority of the world's mass media!

Talk "Twelve Road Blocks – A Look behind the Curtain of Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work"

Peter Haas and Silvia Holzinger, Il Mare Film

In 2005, we started to work on a documentary film on computer pioniers and “grandfather nerds”. Very soon, we met M.I.T. legend and charismatic story teller Joseph Weizenbaum who became the main character of our feature-length documentary “WEIZENBAUM. REBEL AT WORK.” Without funding, without any support of a production company, we yet started shooting in October 2005. During the project, we were confronted with – what we called the twelve road blocks – but ultimately the film was shown on TV, at the transmediale.07 in Berlin, in cinemas and universities on a tour through entire Germany. We want to reveal all the obstacles, pitfalls and setbacks. In the middle of a paradigm shift from traditional film towards digital film, our film had a very tough time to get finished and an even harder time to get presented. Ultimately, we were able to work around the road blocks which in return shaped the aesthetics and language of the film; we used the internet as a complementary resource and we contributed a lot of content and turned our film website into a project site attracting an interested and highly supportive community. During a period of 2 years we developed – what we coined SLOW-BUDGET FILM. For us, the unintendend business model of independence worked out: to market our DVD via website to a growing community which helped us to activate multipliers, get publicity and identify digital cinema locations. → www.ilmarefilm.org / English → www.ilmarefilm.org / German

Talk / Introduction: "8 Bit Movie"

Marcin Ramocki & Justin Strawhand

A combination “rockumentary,” art exposé, and culture-critical investigation, 8 BIT ties together the 1980s demo scene, chip-tune music, and artists using “machinima” and modified computer games. Produced in New York City, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo, the documentary brings a global perspective to the new artistic approaches of the DIY generation that grew up playing Atari, Commodore 64, and other video game consoles. With artists Cory Arcangel, BIT SHIFTER, Bodenstandig 2000, Bubblyfish, Mary Flanagan, Alex Galloway, Glomag, JODI, Paul Johnson, John Klima, Johan Kotlinski, Nullsleep, Joe McKay, Tom Moody, Akiko Sakaizumi, Eddo Stern, TEAMTENDO, Treewave, and Carlo Zanni; media critic Ed Halter; and new media curator/writer Christiane Paul. 90 min. www.8bitmovie.com

Talk Block 1: Space Invaders: Not Arts and Hacktics in a Digital Age

Keynote "When Artists and Designers Mess Around with “living” Technology"

Régine Debatty, we-make-money-not-art

Today artists explore electronics, digital bits but also the so-called “emerging technologies” such as biotechnology or nanotechnology. To what ends? Why should it matter to us?

Talk "DIY: A Militant Embrace of Technology"

Marcin Ramocki

The lecture I would like to propose is an expose on certain crucial phenomena of contemporary new media art; particularly dealing with the “Do It Yourself” attitude toward digital technologies. It is a critical commentary and extension of my documentary project “8 BIT”. Using specific examples of work I used in the film as well as in my other curatorial/artistic undertakings I would like to discuss the new trends in digital art in the context of modernist discourse.

Talk "Camouflaging the Beast (The No-Nerd Hackativist)"

Johnny Golding, University of Greenwich

‘Beauty and the Beast' (God is a Lobster and other forbidden bodies): A 20 minute poetic, moving away from ‘temporality’ as capital ‘T’ Time and restaging it as a sinuous mathematics, one replete with colour, tone, volume, speed. As a ‘colour of time’, the piece moves onto a more peculiar ‘groundless ground’ – that is, the cartelogical fold of the instant, moment. A strange mapping, taking a journey into, around and through on-going mutations, morphs, nuances and shifts of war, assault, boredom, wandering. If Deleuze & Guattari begin to identify the repetition/movement of the curve as ‘difference’ or ‘code’ (meaning, truth), perhaps we could also say, in taking this move one step (or dimension) further, that Beauty and the Beast becomes the sine qua non for the mathematical sublime and aesthetic judgement. Or in a phrase: ‘the political’.

Talk "Blog Around the Clock"

Nils Röller, HGKZ

Artist Dieter Roth argues that language is a machine. This machine determines ways of thinking and feeling. Dieter Roth activates the notion of Mumfords Megamachine. The Megamachine is a structure which engages individual human parts and dominates their performance in time and space. Mumfords Megamachines are set into motion in order to build something concrete. But it is impossible to find such concrete motives in order to explain the phenomenon of blogging. Geert Lovink holds the thesis, that bloggers a per se nihilistic. Is it possible to understand the phenomenon of blogging as a nihilistic megamachine? The talk discusses this question by analyzing different blogs.

Panel "Punk, Hactivism and Do-It-Yourself Intervention"

For Allan Kaprow, "Home Work" suggested shifting work toward self-reliance and the exploration of alternative modes of distribution. One of the hallmarks of new media arts and commerce is the dialectics of technology mass control versus individual resistance and self-determination. Early in the game, youthful consumers realized they had the capability to learn technology codes and devices well enough to challenge emerging hierarchical digital structures and modes of traditional corporate ownership. In a world of increasingly pervasive controlled media space, this trend has led to a sense of grassroots do it your self participation, virtual community sharing and a serious challenge to traditional models of capital. These intentions are present in many of many works by artists using these technologies and reiterate the challenges to the art world posed by predecessors such as Dada and the Situationists. The question of amateurs and experts becomes increasingly unclear as consumer now takes the role of producer. The challenge to authorship posed by both virtual participation and automated digital production recalls the anti-consumerist stance of Punk rock.

Talk Block 2: Designing Space and Composing Content

Keynote "Interactive Spaces"

Jeffrey Huang, EPF Lausanne

What are the effects of digitalization on typological, tectonic and ornamental changes in contemporary architecture and cities? How do our conceptions of space and tectonics change with the infiltration of new elements of interactivity into our surroundings? What are the new functional and aesthetic potentials that become available to us? Where are the opportunities and dangers? In this talk I will discuss such questions at the intersection of the physical and virtual realm through recent examples, built and unbuilt.

Talk "Designing a System for Supporting the Process of Making a Video Sequence"

Shigeki Amitani and Ernest Edmonds, University of Technology Sydney

The aim of this research is to develop a system to support video artists. Design rationales of software for artists should be obtained through investigating artists' practice. In this study, we have analysed the process of making a video sequence in collaboration with an experienced video artist. Based on this analysis we identified design rationales for a system to support the process of making a video sequence. A prototype system “Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer for Time-based Information (KNC4TI)” has been developed.

Talk "Real-time Multimedia Composition using LUA"

Wesley Smith and Graham Wakefield, University of California, Santa Barbara

In this paper, we present a new interface for programming multimedia compositions in Max/MSP/Jitter using the Lua scripting language. Lua is extensible and efficient making it an ideal choice for designing a programmatic interface for multimedia compositions. First, we discuss the distinctions of graphical and textual interfaces for composition and the requirements for a productive compositional workflow, and then we describe domain specific implementations of Lua bindings as Max externals for graphics and audio in that order.

Talk "Enter the Core: Live Visuals Techniques Exposed"

Simon Schubiger and Matthias Specht, Corebounce

Performing live on more than hundred events over the last six years, Corebounce now allows the audience to see behind the curtain. Corebounce’s live visual system tailored to audio-driven club visuals is exposed inside out. Aspects such as spatial dynamics, non-linear video editing, 2D and 3D content mixing as well as temporal and spatial composition are discussed in the live visuals context. Some practical problems are raised and their pragmatic solutions presented.

Talk Block 3: Digital Puppetry: No Strings Attached?

Talk "The Reconceptualization of the Puppets Theatre Performance in the Digital Domain"

Adriano Solidoro, University of Milan Bicocca

The exact definition of “digital puppetry” is still subject to debate within the puppetry and computer graphics communities (performance animation? motion capture technologies?, Second Life simulation?). Nevertheless, digital puppets theatre can be the medium of an intergenerational communication and a field of investigation of the relationship performance arts/digital media. Digital puppetry asks to consider the significance of some aspects within time-based digital media: about creative issues, together with topics related to performance arts, such as the meaning, the aesthetic and the epistemology of the computer as theatre; the performance within a gaming environment; and the audience experience.

Talk "Anthropocentrism and the Staging of Robots"

Louis-Philippe Demers, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and Jana Horakova, Masaryk University

As an early analysis of robotic performances and robots as performers, this paper focuses on the notions of anthropomorphism and anthropopathy. By investigating the representations of the human throughout a history of robots, we analyze robotic performances from a theatrical audience ‘pragmatic’ point of view. Hence, this interpretation of robots as performers, or staged robots, involves an act of suspension of disbelief as a first and constitutive condition of theatrical reality.

Talk "CoPuppet: Collaborative Interaction in Virtual Puppetry"

Semi Ryu, Virginia Commonwealth University and Stefano Faralli, University of Rome "La Sapienza"

CoPuppet is a framework for the development of performances of virtual puppetry. In particular, it defines a class of interactive systems in which to realize collaborative virtual puppet performances involving several puppeteers. Users are able to control puppet’s body parts and interact with the puppets by producing gestures which are captured by video devices and translated into control parameters for the movements of the puppet. Moreover, a storyteller realizes another form of control, as the sounds captured by a microphone are used to steer in real time mouth movements and facial expressions of the virtual puppet on the screen. The result of such interactions will see the emergence of a cooperative management of the puppets’ movements.

Talk "Experiments in Digital Puppetry: Video Hybrids in Apple's Quartz Composer"

Ian Grant, Thames Valley University

In his paper, Ian Grant documents a prototype musical performance called “Of Minnie the Moocher and Me”. He describes the workings of a real time performance system that facilitates screen based digital puppetry and scenography made from hybrid ‘mixed reality’ video composites. Grant discusses midi controllable software created using Apple’s free developers tool “Quartz Composer” and open source software that enables wireless bluetooth control of an on-screen avatar with a Nintendo Wii-Remote game controller.The piece stands alone as a performance. Additionally, it is an exploration of the software and technologies that enable real time digital storytelling.

Panel "Expressive Speech, Gesture and Interaction in the Context of Puppetry"

Traditional puppetry has evolved over centuries in most cultures and there are variations with many facettes. Therefore, the panel starts out by exploring different definitions of puppetry. Why is puppetry important? Then, the panel focuses on the transition to the digital age: Why and how do traditional elements reappear in the digital domain? Are there elements that appear in digital puppetry that did not exist before? Does digital puppetry give us novel means for virtuous expression? Do such expressive interfaces have influence in other areas besides of puppet play?

Talk Block 4: Take hold and participate: From DIY to Networked Performance

Keynote "Participation and the Networked_Performance Blog"

Helen Thorington & Michelle Riel, turbulence.org

Programmable Media and Open Platforms for Creativity and Collaboration. Based on the expansion of creative practice archived on the networked_performance blog, we explore 1) the creation of original software for tools and services for creative and social use, such as a public commons meta layer on the WWW conceived as a continuous public space for collaboration; and 2) the creation of original work using the tools available within open platforms such as Second Life and MySpace to build community and raise awareness. We locate this media practice within an historical continuum and compare the parallel shift from the object to process, engagement and experience.

Talk "Tuning in Rorschach Maps"

Will Pappenheimer, Pace University

Many contemporary artists are working with strategies to remap public, informational and social space. Their processes often involve setting up a prescriptive, algorithmic or participatory work that yields an unknown product. What can we observe about the results? What is audience reception of these works? In addition to visiting historical precedents in performance and music, this paper will explore how real time Internet statistical, geographic and textual mapping has become available for both practical and recreational purposes and how new media artists are engaging these methods to test the possibilities of Informational aesthetics.

Talk "Imaging Place: Globalization and Immersive Media"

John Craig Freeman, Emerson College

"Imaging Place" is a place-based, virtual reality art project that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and three-dimensional technologies to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. The goal of the project is to develop the technologies, the methodology and the content for truly immersive and navigable narrative, from real places. The project has been under development since 1997 and includes work from around the world. The interface leads the user from global satellite images to virtual reality scenes on the ground. Users can then navigate an immersive virtual space.

Talk "The Maintenance of a Terminal"

Franziska Lamprecht & Hajoe Moderegger, eteam

Has this reality always been there, waiting to be named and activated in order to become possible? For the last 4 years we have bought random parcels of desert on ebay to uncover the possibilities that are inherent in the land.

International Airport Montello (IAM) started in 2004 when we won 10 Acres of desert in Nevada, near Montello, “the town that refuses to die”. Through “Artificial Traffic Jam”, an event we conducted to solve a “road problem” on our property we met some of the town’s 65 residents and discovered their vision for the 21st. century: Air Travel, a dream based on two abandoned airstrips just outside of town.

Panel "Re-Charting Reason: Remapping Public, Informational and Social Spaces"

The emergence of socially networked media in the future form of "Web 2.0" is perhaps the largest scale form of distinctly participatory media ever experienced by humanity. Though by no means utopian, this trend signals a dramatic shift towards user based production and distributed content. The processes involved are facilitated by instant communications, open sourced information and the ease of consumer electronics. Agency is in many senses telematic but increasingly no less significant than physical action. Global communities are formed without the limitations of geographic location and knit together by a myriad of common interests. The open work, while iconic to this media moment, has been an artwork trajectory since the Fluxus and Performance works of the 1960s and 70s. Technology artists of the last decade have been exploring the potential of networked community, tele-action and the open sourced artwork in software and hardware. Their processes are algorithmic, performative and cumulative. The results test the human computer for possibilities of human presence, poetic mechanics, alternative pragmatics and the spacial collective artwork.

Talk Block 5: Artists in Labs: Puzzles in Process: Interfacing Art & Science

One of the most controversial differences between the culture of art and the world of science are the contrasting attitudes towards the actual production process. In science all events or occurrences are said to be the result of certain input states leading to certain outcome states and the use of set processes, which can be either repeated or invented in order to confirm hypotheses. In art the word "process" is connected with human experience and concrete art objects are actually accumulative results from the occasion of this experience. Therefore many artists are not interested in the relations between outcomes and their duplicated processes, but they are interested in how the actual process itself can be reflected upon and changed based on their own discoveries along-the-way. In the artist-in-labs process we are interested to survey the effect of merging these processes in order to create new puzzles.

This conference attempts to reflect upon the mid-way process in both fields, an experience particularly relevant for artists who have "hands on" access to scientific labs or are immersed in scientific environments. The group of artists and scientists currently involved in the Swiss artists-in-labs program are at the middle point of their collaborations and will make presentations of their "work in progress". Also in relation to the value of our process oriented topic the following questions will be discussed: What innovative processes and outcomes can emerge from trans-disciplinary practice? Could representative results be transformed by the sharing of ethical debates? Will new languages emerge from a re-examination of subjective and objective viewpoints?

These discussions will also include representatives from the science labs for the Swiss artists-in-labs program awards for 2008.

Keynote "Why Art-Science Interaction Matters"

Roger Malina, CNRS Marseille

Science and technology are fed by and grow from the cultural imaginary. Human senses allow us to perceive only portions of the world necessary for our biological survival. The history of art and science document a very basic urge to push into new territories of experience and knowledge, an urge that leads to augmentation, extension and development of new senses and cognition through new behavious and devices. As part of the 40th Anniversay of our organisation Leonardo, we are co sponsoring a conference in Prague on Art and Science in Extreme and Hostile Environments. I will motivate why I think that art-science interaction and collaboration is important in driving science and technology agendas of the future, enabling the cultural conditions for a sustainable society.

Poster Abstracts

A Dynamic Concept Base: A Component for Generative Systems

Shigeki Amitani and Ernest Edmonds, University of Technology Sydney

This paper presents our on-going projects "Generative Website Project" and "Untitled Media Project", and a core computational component "Dynamic Concept Base (DCB)". The aim of these projects is to enhance interactions between public audiences, artists and artworks. The DCB is one of the central components across the projects supported by the Australasian CRC for Interactive Design (ACID).

Panoramic Art in Real Time

Philipp Bönhof and Sven Stauber, ETH Zurich

In the past few years and near future, technology moved and will move continuously towards computers which will be more and more integrated. Not only in purely technical but also in artistic environments we can make use of this and contribute new applications and artworks. We want to give the opportunity to experience art at first hand and directly influence the art as an observer. We achieve this with a completely wearable equipment.

MacchinaPerTracciare - Interactive Installation

Ruben Coen Cagli, University of Napoli

Every gesture, every action we take leaves traces. Independently of our will, our existence modifies space and things, and contributes to the “memory of places”. MacchinaPerTracciare is an interactive installation that induces an aesthetic experience of the traces we leave, producing a visualization of the recent memory of a place.

The Institute of Unnecessary Research - Art/Science/Technology Interaction and Socially Engaged Performance

Anna Dumitriu, University of Brighton

This paper describes The Institute of Unnecessary Research, an International group of artists working in the field of practice-based research into science and technology. Artists involved investigate science and technology from a wholly artistic paradigm, making wide and varied connections, but working solidly within their fields in such a way that their research could be of equal interest to the scientific community as to an artistic one. The research is widely disseminated via performance events and exhibitions within the community in a non-elitist way. Audience interaction is also key and often visitors to events participate ‘hands on’ in the experiments/performances.

Robot Aitu: An Attempt to make Wave Emissions of Mobile Phones Perceptible

Lucas Gross, HGK FHNW

Robot Aitu transforms high frequency waves emitted by mobile phones of nearby users into acoustical and visual effects. Depending on the intensity of the emissions, the robot triggers sonar-like sounds and a snowstorm of small styrofoam globules in a capsule. Aitu freely moves around using a simple technology of sensors which makes it turn once it «collides» with an object. The project mainly focuses on detecting and exposing the existence of wave emissions by mobile phones. Visitors can use their own mobile phones to activate and intensify the effects by dialing a number of their choice. Robot Aitu, in essence, makes invisible things visible.

Sound - Color - Space

Marco Feriencik, Stefan Müller Arisona, Silke Lang, ETH Zurich, and Natalia Sidler, HMT Zurich

This project investigates the correlations between sound, color, shape and space. In our work we are building upon the Farblichtflügel (color piano) project under the direction of the pianist Natalia Sidler at the Hochschule fuer Musik und Theater Zurich. Natalia Sidler and her team consisting of 19 members built a prototypical instrument to transform the generation of sound into colored and animated images. In this paper we present a first visualization performance. Therefore we adapted and expanded the Soundium software based on synaesthetric rules. The generation of color, light and shape results from a digital input via a midi interface and the software.

His Master's Voice

Manfred Kroboth

The talk will deals about the history, the technical possibilities and resulting from that the possibilities of synthetic speech.

Un Message Evidemment

Robert Lawrence, University of South Florida

“Un Message, Evidemment” is an ongoing performance and “open-source” Internet-enabled film. The performance actions are built around the making of a collaborative film. The film is a story about communication. The performance is a communication about story. UME is partially shot but not written... UME will be written through mobile phones, voice messages, sms’s, email, conversations… sounds produced by the participants of festivals, seminars, workshops and visitors to our web site: http://www.unmessage.com. Anyone can use this web site to make their own UME. I don’t own it. UME is an invitation to a new way of making film.

SQEAK: A Mobile Multi Platform Phone and Networks Gesture Sensor

Dennis Majoe, Stefan Müller Arisona, Art Clay, ETH Zurich, and Simon Schubiger, Swisscom Innovations

Mobile phone users could benefit from a simple low cost add-on allowing them to use their phone to control highly interactive public space applications involving one user or a large number of simultaneous users. In our work, the real time hand movement gestures of mobile phone users are sensed using miniature accelerometers that send the orientation signals over the phone and network’s audio channel to a central server. With minimal delay, minimal connection protocol incompatibility and minimal mobile phone type or version discrimination large numbers of users could control public space cultural and entertainment applications using simple gesture movements or take part in large social events and express their opinions.

Mini Sound Modules for Installation & Performance

Joshua Rosenstock, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Creating small, autonomous sound modules for digital audio installation or interactive performance.

AudioTagger: Wireless Phonography

Eva Sjuve, University of Plymouth

audioTagger, a location-based sound application for mobile phones. audioTagger is using the mobile phone to capture a sonic moment in urban space. In this application the mobile phone is the only device needed to participate, and to explore hybrid mediated space. audioTagger can be defined as wireless phonography bridged with network mapping. Urban space is the subject for investigation. A momentary event is captured as a sonic expression. The analogy to snap shots in photography can be made.

We are Legion Changing Rooms

Leon Tan, Antti Sakari Saario and Amanda Newall, The Hollywoods

We are Legion is an anthropological research project involving a mixed reality changing room and a constructed band. Conceptually, our project experiments with and researches emerging mixed reality ecologies arising from the mass imbrication of the virtual (in the form of social software based activities) in the so called ‘real’ world. We are Legion is at once a work of performance art and a penetrating investigation into the production, consumption and distribution of contemporary media, sound and the Sensible itself through social media technologies such as MySpace.

Hearing Sirens

Cathy Van Eck, University of Leiden

A usual fashion to hear music nowadays is through headphones. The mp3-player made more music transportable than ever before and streets and public spaces are crowded nowadays with people, living in their own acoustic world. My project is about reversing this situation. Using the same mp3-players, this time it is not for creating private music, but the music coming out of the mp3-players is sent to two big portable horn-loudspeakers, radiating the sound to the environment. The sound coming out of the hornloudspeakers reveals by the reflections it causes the acoustical qualities of the environment.

Robotcowboy

Daniel Wilcox and Oscar Ramos

This paper presents the conceptual and technical work behind the computer sound performance “experiments in energy” by robotcowboy. This ritualistic performance consists of 3 acts: The Joy of Life, in which bodily motion becomes a sound interface; Death, the destruction of electronic machines fuels the demand for light; and Rebirth, a personification of the cyborg-self, the man-machine, blesses the audience through touch and sound.

Copyright @ ETH Zürich

Page last modified on December 30, 2017, at 09:18 PM