RIXC FESTIVAL 2019, THE 4TH OPEN FIELDS CONFERENCE ON ART-SCIENCE RESEARCH AND UN/GREEN EXHIBITION
Ellen PEARLMAN. AIBO – A Rapid Prototype Emotionally Intelligent
AI/BCI Body of Light
Cloud-based analytic engines for emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence like Google API, IBM Watson, and others function through semantic analysis of speech-to-text input. They apply weighted values based on magnitude or strength of an emotional statement, and score or overall emotional analysis of the statement’s positive, negative, or neutral qualities. These types of analyses can also be used by both speech to text and text to speech specialized chatbots, and incorporated into analytic engines tasked with making critical decisions on customer service, healthcare, jurisprudence, social sorting, employment, and migration among others. This AIBO work-in-progress opera depicts a proof of concept, initial rapid prototyped interaction between an emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence entity powered by machine learning and the human brain. It represents the sterility of algorithmic decisions versus a sentient human being’s emotions, with a subject’s brainwaves visible on their body highlighting inherent tensions between implicit mathematical analysis, and complex human irrationality.
Dr. Ellen Pearlman’s areas of inquiry are the brain, consciousness, surveillance and artificial intelligence. She created “Noor: A Brain Opera” the world’s first interactive, immersive EEG brainwave opera in a 360 degree theater. Ellen is a Fulbright World Learning Specialist in Media, Art and Technology, on faculty at Parsons/New School University, and Director of the ThoughtWorks Arts Residency, President of Art-A-Hack (TM), and Director of the Volumetric Society of New York. She has presented at numerous international conferences and published extensively.
Phil AYRES. Flora robotica – a bio-hybrid approach to architecture
The objective of the flora robotica project is to investigate closely linked symbiotic relationships between living plants and robots for the purpose of growing architectural artifacts and spaces. To achieve this aim, a diverse cross-disciplinary consortium has been assembled drawing together expertise in Architecture, Computer Science & Swarm Robotics, Artificial Life & Biology, Artificial Evolution & Robotics, Sensing & Mechatronics and Molecular & Cellular Biology. Our architectural motivation is to lay principled foundations for potentially disruptive alternatives to current paradigms of resource intensive construction by harnessing the capabilities of living systems – specifically their capabilities for ‘free’ material sourcing, resource distribution, adaptation, decision making and self-repair. These project objectives challenge orthodox approaches to architectural design, demanding new approaches, interfaces, modelling and construction workflows to explore, design, construct and maintain bio-hybrid architectures. The paper will discuss the design approaches we are developing to address the following core challenges:
1. Bio-hybrids exist in states of continual growth and adaptation.
2. Bio-hybrids require methods for continuously projecting growth futures given initial and anticipated conditions.
3. Bio-hybrids require alternative standards of tolerance and design objective achievement
4. High-level architectural objectives require decomposition methods for steering low-level self-organising behaviours of specimens.
Phil Ayres is an architect, researcher and educator. He is an Associate Professor at CITA, which he joined in 2009 after a decade of teaching and research at the Bartlett, UCL. His research primarily focuses on adaptive architectural systems that couple technical & organic elements, together with the development of complementary design environments. This is currently pursued through the EU funded project flora robotica of which Phil is a Principle Investigator. Phil’s teaching roles are focused at Masters and PhD level and he is also the editor of the title Persistent Modelling – extending the role of architectural representation published by Routledge.
Elke REINHUBER. The Bluest Skies – about the desire to build a perfect world
This artistic research explores the wide range of hues of the blue sky above in replica cities and their real counterparts. With the current hype to reconstruct idealised versions of our surroundings – or to build captivating imaginary worlds in Virtual Reality, one might start to wonder how reality can be defined. Only nature reminds us of what is authentic in contrast to its reproduction. A glimpse at the sky refers to the true nature of replicated or displaced places of desire.
Introduction : There are more than 10,000 km and seven (six in summer) time zones between Colmar in Alsace and Colmar Tropicale near Bukit Tinggi. But both places look quite similar. These two locations might be extremes, however, the desire to be in another location than the actual one is nothing unusual. To experience the foreign too closely seems dangerous and disturbing.
Skies hardly lie : Although the façades might be well reconstructed, looking at the sky above reveals that they might be in another location than expected. While the night hours of French Colmar differ from summer to winter by 10 hours, the reconstructed version of the city offers 12 daylight hours throughout the year with only fleeting sunrises and sunsets compared to long lasting blue hours with lengthy shadows and a significant change of colour temperature. Even more convenient are the constant blue skies like in the malls of Macau, in which a short footwalk connects the replica cityscape of Paris with the one of Venice. The sky gleams with the same intensity throughout the whole day, however diverse small details disclose the painted or projected celestial sphere. In my photographic series »The Bluest Skies« I introduce these diverse perspectives on the firmament. Heavenly blue is much more than a fascinating and ever changing colour. Since the atmosphere consists of particles smaller than the wavelengths of the sun’s radiation, those atoms and molecules disperse in the same frequency (Rayleigh scattering) and the blue wavelengths interact with those particles ten times more efficiently than the red ones. Pollution, dust and condensation share their qualities with the light on its travel from the skies, so from a terrestrial perspective, the vault of heaven shines in shades between azure and celeste. With digital editing processes, optimising the colour of the sky to a desirable blue is a common image manipulation technique. However, this approach is nothing new – back in the early days of photography, Gustave Le Gray’s «Cloud Study» displayed an attempt to make the sky visible, with a method very similar to HDR, although in Black and White. The general usage of red, orange and yellow filters in B/W photography was a common strategy and the colour retouching on the print in early days or the work of the lithographer before printing images was a highly respected adjustment, mostly done with airbrush. Gradient filters in diverse shades to darken the luminescent part of the image were also often applied in colour photography. It is an interesting physical phenomenon that we see the sky in all its splendour, but cannot capture it accordingly.
To find the right hue is not a trivial task, because depending on location, language and colour scheme or model, the colour varies hugely. From a greyish light tone to a bright mid-tone blue, a wide range of colours is visible on the firmament above, as per definition, at noon.
Elke Reinhuber is not your average artist, because she became a specialist on choice, decision making and counterfactual thoughts in media arts. As a decidophobic in her own life, she explores in particular alternative layers of the here and now with immersive environments and expanded photography. Reinhuber teaches and researches at ADM/ NTU in Singapore. Initially Elke Reinhuber received professional training as an industrial photographer and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. During her doctoral research, she received the Baden-Württemberg grant to study with Armin Linke, Michael Clegg and Isaac Julien at HfG Karlsruhe. Her award-winning artwork was presented in several international institutions, most recently BOZAR Brussels, Manifesta Palermo, ZKM Karlsruhe, Fotomuseum Winterthur and V&A Digital Futures in London.
Gabriela GALATI. Ongoing Research for a Complex Ecology of Posthuman Art
Starting from a brief genealogy of what may be considered the first posthuman artistic practices, from Marcel Duchamp to the Land Art and the first Art & Technology approaches, and from an analysis of some particular artistic practices, I would like to outline a research hypothesis which I have been developing on in previous works, and that will be further explored in works to follow. Although the predominant tendency in the theorisations on posthuman art is to clearly separate the topics concerning art and technology from those concerning what I call artistic practices of the living, I will begin to work on an articulation that on the one hand can contemplate the specific differences of each one of these practices, but where on the other hand the artistic practices of living and of new media art can be part of the same landscape, or ecology: that is to say, to be understood and outlined with a methodology that allows to investigate in depth, following Jacques Derrida, that what we share as humans with the living as a whole is not only a shared passivity and finitude, but also the fact that in the case of human animals this finitude is inseparable from the prosthetic constitution of the machine of language as always already technological beings. It is in this sense that a reflection on the living must necessarily include the technological dimension and vice versa. From this point of departure we can therefore speak of a complex, if not complete, ecology of post- human art.
Gabriela Galati is Professor of Theory and Methodology of Mass Media and Media Art Theory at NABA, New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. In the past she has taught Research Methodology at the University of Buenos Aires, at the University of the Argentine Social Museum, Buenos Aires, and Media Art Theory at Domus Academy, Milan. She published Duchamp Meets Turing: Arte, Modernismo, Postumano (Postmedia Books, 2017), she writes reviews of books on art, philosophy, science and technology for Leonardo Reviews / Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), and regularly collaborates with AdVersus and Scenari (Mimesis) with scientific publications. For Scenari she is the editor of the #10 issue dedicated to Posthuman Art. Founder of ECCENTRIC Art & Research, she is currently also director of the contemporary art gallery at the A29 Project Room in Milan and Caserta. She obtained a PhD at the University of Plymouth for which her dissertation addressed the relationship between art theory, digitalisation processes and the posthuman.
Oksana CHEPELYK. “Green architecture” and “algorithmic society”
Starting from the basic peculiarities of the development of “green architecture” notion in the modern design and construction using such examples of design and construction of “green” projects as: constructions designed by Arthur Wiechula; small architectural forms made of live plants; the Tree Cathedral created by Giuliano Mauri; a multilayer structure The Patient Gardener in the Leonardo campus of the Politecnico di Milano; Baubotanik Tower of Ferdinand Ludwig, a three-storey tower made of live white willows; Ecoboulevard in Vallecas, Madrid created by the architects of Urban Ecosystem in 2000 and also using some projects performed in Lviv Polytechnic National University at the Department of Design of Architectural Environment as architectural, spatial, landscape and functional solution to terrace parks of Pidhirtsi Castle with the elaboration of the mobile landscape elements and the architectural and object environment, trough euphoria about “green architecture” brand and “sustainable” abstract will explore the increasing technical manipulation and exploitation of living systems so-called “sustainable” buildings. It turned out that some buildings not living up to “green” label, proven by the extensive problems with many “sustainability” icons. Landform architecture derived from algorithm opens up new possibilities for relationships between natural systems and built form, landscape and architecture.
Dr. Oksana Chepelyk is a leading researcher of The New Technologies Department, Modern Art Research Institute of Ukraine, author of the book “The Interaction of Architectural Spaces, Contemporary Art and New Technologies” (2009) and curator of the IFSS, Kyiv. Oksana Chepelyk studied art in Kyiv, followed PhD course, Moscow, Amsterdam University, Banff Centre, Canada, Bauhaus Dessau, Germany, Fulbright Research Program at UCLA, USA. Awards: ArtsLink1997 Award (USA), FilmVideo99 (Italy), EMAF2003 Werklietz Award 2003 (Germany), ArtsLink2007 Award (USA), Cinemadamare Award @ Venice IFF, Artraker Award2013 (UK). Works shown: MOMA, NY; MMA, Zagreb; German Historical Museum, Berlin and Munich; Museum of the Arts History, Vienna; MCA, Skopje; MJT, LA,; “DIGITAL MEDIA Valencia”, Spain; MACZUL, Maracaibo, Venezuela, “The File”, Sao Paulo; LPM 2017 Amsterdam.