Month: November 2022

Drought

Claude Heiland-Allen

The climate catastrophe is causing rains to fail in various places. When wet mud dries, it shrinks and cracks, exposing more surface area to the drying air. In this way the cracks multiply, culminating in dust blown away on the breeze.

Claude Heiland-Allen is an artist from London interested in the complex emergent
behaviour of simple systems, unusual geometries, and mathematical aesthetics.
From 2005 through 2011 he was a member of the GOTO10 collective, whose
mission was to promote Free/Libre Open Source Software in Art. Since 2011,
Claude has continued as an independent artist, researcher and software developer.
His current main projects include various deep zooming tools for 2D escape time
fractals, and musical performance live-coding sounds in the C programming
language.

https://mathr.co.uk

Boogaloo Bias

Jennifer Gradecki, Derek Curry

Boogaloo Bias is an interactive artwork and research project that addresses some of the known problems with the unregulated use of facial recognition technologies, including the practice of ‘brute forcing’ where, in the absence of high-quality images of a suspect, law enforcement agents have been known to substitute images of celebrities the suspect is reported to resemble. To lampoon this approach, the Boogaloo Bias facial recognition algorithm searches for members of the anti-law enforcement militia, the Boogaloo Bois, using a facial recognition algorithm trained on faces of characters from the 1984 movie Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. The film is the namesake for the Boogaloo Bois, who emerged from 4chan meme culture and have been present at both right and left-wing protests in the US since January 2020. The system is used to search live video feeds, protest footage, and images that are uploaded to the Boogaloo Bias website. All matches made by the system are false positives. No information from the live feeds or website uploads is saved or shared. Boogaloo Bias raises questions about automated decision making, public accountability and oversight within a socio-technical system where machines are contributing to a decision-making process. Facial recognition technology allows for the quick surveillance of hundreds of people simultaneously and the ability to automate decisions using artificial intelligence, establishing a power structure controlled by a technocratic elite. Rather than providing a solution for how to improve facial recognition, the project pushes the logic behind the current forms and uses of facial recognition in law enforcement to an extreme, highlighting the absurdity of how this technology is being developed and used. Boogaloo Bias is made using only open source software, including OpenCV, Flask, dlib, Pillow, and the Python face-recognition module.
https://www.boogaloo-bias.art/

Jennifer Gradecki is an artist-theorist who investigates secretive and specialized socio-technical systems. Her artistic research has focused on social science techniques, financial instruments, dataveillance technologies, intelligence analysis, and social media misinformation. Gradecki has presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), ISEA (Barcelona), National Gallery X (London), NeMe (Cypress), ADAF (Athens), International Symposium on Computational Media Art (Hong Kong), and the Centro Cultural de España (México). Her research has been published in Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Her artwork has been funded by Science Gallery Dublin, Science Gallery Detroit, and the NEoN Digital Arts Festival.

Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work critiques and addresses spaces for intervention in automated decision-making systems. His work has addressed automated stock trading systems, Open-Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT), and algorithmic classification systems. His artworks have replicated aspects of social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. Derek earned his MFA in New Genres from UCLA’s Department of Art in 2010 and his PhD in Media Study from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. https://derekcurry.com/

Privacy is intimac

Louis Frehring

Privacy is intimacy is an artwork composed of two silver chains on each of which are engraved the halves of two PGP key pairs. On each chain is written a public key and the private key associated with the other chain’s public key. Thus, it is possible to establish a secure and encrypted connection between two people, allowing them to communicate without their privacy being compromised, making Privacy is intimacy the ultimate jewel for lovers !

Born in 1994, Louis Frehring is a French contemporary artist working in the transdisciplinary field of
new media art, sculpture and visual arts. His work is mainly composed by heteroclite installations
and crafted devices that deal with technology both as material and subject. Frehring’s work is
focused on getting the viewer more knowledgeable of what technology is, how it works and what it
changes in nature, in society and in our proper selves.

Going Viral

Jennifer Gradecki, Derek Curry

Going Viral is an interactive artwork that invites people to intervene in the spreading of misinformation by sharing informational videos about COVID-19 that feature algorithmically generated celebrities, social media influencers, and politicians that have made or shared claims about the coronavirus that are counter to the official consensus of healthcare professionals and were categorized as misinformation. In the videos, algorithmically-generated speakers deliver public service announcements or present news stories that counter the misinformation they had previously promoted on social media. The sharable YouTube videos are made using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) that is trained on sets of two images where one image becomes a map to produce a second image, resulting in a glitchy reconstruction of the speaker. The recognizable, but clearly digitally-produced aesthetic prevents the videos from being classified as “deepfakes” and removed by online platforms, while inviting viewers to reflect on the constructed nature of celebrity, and question the authority of celebrities on issues of public health and the validity of information shared on social media. Celebrities and social media influencers are now entangled in the discourse on public health, and are sometimes given more authority than scientists or public health officials. Like the rumors they spread, the online popularity of social media influencers and celebrities is amplified through neural network-based content recommendation algorithms used by online platforms. https://goingviral.art/

ennifer Gradecki is an artist-theorist who investigates secretive and specialized socio-technical systems. Her artistic research has focused on social science techniques, financial instruments, dataveillance technologies, intelligence analysis, and social media misinformation. Gradecki has presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), ISEA (Barcelona), National Gallery X (London), NeMe (Cypress), ADAF (Athens), International Symposium on Computational Media Art (Hong Kong), and the Centro Cultural de España (México). Her research has been published in Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Her artwork has been funded by Science Gallery Dublin, Science Gallery Detroit, and the NEoN Digital Arts Festival.

Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work critiques and addresses spaces for intervention in automated decision-making systems. His work has addressed automated stock trading systems, Open-Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT), and algorithmic classification systems. His artworks have replicated aspects of social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. Derek earned his MFA in New Genres from UCLA’s Department of Art in 2010 and his PhD in Media Study from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. https://derekcurry.com/

Futurabilities

Azahara Cerezo

A bot programmed to read parts of “Futurability. The age of Impotence and the horizon of possibility” (2019) to other chatbots, who answer and progressively learn from the conversation. In this book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi analyzes the global order that shapes our politics and our imagination, proposing that the key to a radical change lies in the cognitive work and its relationship with technologies. “Futurabilities” explores human-automatic conversational possibilities around the current context of connected solitudes. This online action was developed in 2020 and takes as reference a previous project entitled “A connected robot of one’s own”, which was shown in the frame of Piksel Festival in 2014.

Azahara Cerezo researches the particularities and contradictions of the territory, whose physical dimension is liquefied by digitalising processes of global scope.
She has exhibited individually at Bòlit Contemporary Art Centre (Girona), Centro de Arte La Regenta (Las Palmas) and MAL (Sevilla). Her projects have been shown in group exhibitions such as “Juntos aparte” (Bienalsur. Cúcuta, Colombia), “Creativate” (National Arts Festival, Makhanda, South Africa), “We are as Gods…” at Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Holland), “Provincia 53” at MUSAC (Leon, Spain) or “Especies de espacios” at MACBA (Barcelona).

Creative PCB-design Workshop

Marc Duseiller

Creatives, designers, painters welcome! No previous knowledge in electronics or circuit design is needed.

As a creative design / drawing workshop we want to explore how creativity can be use to make unique designs of fuctional electronic circuits. We also will discuss what means Open Hardware and why sharing detailed instructions can lead to a diversity of personal designs and improving the accessibility for DIY electronics workshops.

In this creative drawing workshop, we will learn the most basic introduction to read schematics of electronics circuits, and how to implement it as a functional PCB (Printer Circuit Board) where all the connections are drawn in copper. We will learn what are footprints of components and what are the different “layers” for preparing a PCB design for manufacturing (in China factory of DIY home etching).

This workshop also serves for re-thinking the diy-CAD methodology (do-it-yourself Children Aided Design) and applying it to the fork of the peepsy, based on the Continuity Tester by David Johnson-Davies. The peepsy circuit is based on the ATTINY85 functions as a continuity tester, the famouse “peeps” of every multimeter, that allows you to test if an electric connection is present, testing your aux cables, or debbugging other electronics. And it has a pink LED on it!

What circuit will we do?

The example circuit is based on the peepsy, by Michael Egger (a.n.y.m.a.) and it has even a practical function as a continuity tester, the most useful tool to test if a connection is present, in a cable or on a circuit. It’s the “peep” that is one of the functions of all multimeters, and usually the one we use the most! The circuit is very simple, 1 capacitor, 2 resistors, 1 LED, a buzzer to make the “beep”, a coin battery holder and an µ-controller (the Attiny85). Due to the special software on the attiny, it will “sleep” all the time, and only use a little electricity when testing, so the battery last almost forever!

All the materials will be available on site, pen and paper, colors, footprints.

https://www.hackteria.org/wiki/Diy-CAD#Workshops

BITS AND BYTES

Marko Timlin

BITS AND BYTES is a large-scale kinetic sound installation consisting of 104 floppy disk drives. This art project links science with art, technology with nature and the past with the present.

The installation’s sonic outcome is generated solely by the mechanical motions of the 3,5” floppy disk drives controlled by arduino microprocessors. The audible frequency of each floppy disk drive can be regulated in real-time resembling a choir of 104 independent voices creating highly complex sonic textures and pulsations.

BITS AND BYTES could also be described as a “robotic instrument” combining the precision of the digital world with the chaotic nature of the physical world.

This art project is based on the following principles and ideas:
• “Technology won’t take control as long as man can misuse it.” (a quote from Finnish inventor Erkki Kurenniemi)
• the artistic misuse of technology
• the resuscitation of obsolete technology from the 1980s and 1990s into a new artistic life
• connecting the digital domain with the physical world
• the joy of exploring technology and radically alienating it
• the poetry of machine music

Marko Timlin is a Finnish-German artist creating artworks that link science with art, technology with nature and the past with the present. His artistic work centers on the technical, aesthetic and philosophical development of kinetic sound sculptures, dynamic light installations, performances with self-made sound machines and multimedia theater plays. He is at the same time seeker, musician, performer, sculptor, poet, but also craftsman, and stage director.

Timlin’s works have been exhibited and performed world-wide including at Whitebox New York (USA), Sight & Sound Festival Montréal (CA), Fylkingen Stockholm (SE), Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma Helsinki (FI), Mal au Pixel Paris (FR), E:vent gallery London (UK), MIMstuudio Tallinn (EST), Neues Museum Nürnberg (DE), Espoo Museum of Modern Art (FI), Digital Media Festival Valencia (ES), EMTRCC Nanchang (CN), Lofoten Sound Art Symposium (NO) and Pori Art Museum (FI).

Local time

Julian Scordato

Time introduces the question of how to write things, how to divide them. The computer screen, as well as a page of text or music, becomes the medium of writing. Local time is an interactive audiovisual installation that is fed by the acoustic environment in which is placed, giving a context-sensitive feedback in a specific sonic language. The system listens and takes note of what is happening in the local present moment.

Julian Scordato is a composer and artist whose work focuses mainly on sound, graphics, algorithms and interactivity. He studied composition and electronic music at the Conservatory of Venice and sound art at the University of Barcelona. Co-founder of the Arazzi Laptop Ensemble, coordinator of SaMPL – Sound and Music Processing Lab, he is a professor of electroacoustic music composition and performance at the Conservatory of Padua, Italy. As a technologist, Scordato has written articles and presented research results related to interactive systems for music performance and graphic notation in conferences and masterclasses.

His award-winning electroacoustic and audiovisual works have been performed and exhibited in international festivals and institutions including Venice Biennale, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, Electronic Language International Festival (Sao Paulo), Cervantes Institute (Rio de Janeiro), International Image Festival (Manizales), Gaudeamus Music Week (Utrecht), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), Sonorities Festival (Belfast), Seoul International Computer Music Festival, Art & Science Days (Bourges), Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (Stanford), Athens Digital Arts Festival, ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), Spektrum Art Science Community (Berlin), and New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. His music has been broadcast by Radio UNAM, NAISA Webcast, Resonance FM, RAI Radio3, RadioCemat, Radio Papesse, RadioCona, Radiophrenia, Radio Gracia, Radio Circulo, Radio Tsonami, and other stations. His scores have been published by Ars Publica and Taukay Edizioni Musicali.

VastWaste: Data-Driven Projection Art and VR Installation

Özge Samanci

Demo Video / Trailer
https://vimeo.com/591334429

Concept
Humans once perceived oceans as boundless, and thus impossible to pollute—until we created the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The same pattern is now repeating in outer space.
VastWaste is a data-driven, projection art installation that illuminates the parallels and interplay between marine pollution and space debris. It can also be experienced in Virtual Reality.
Human activities have scattered millions of objects into Earth’s orbit. Since there is no friction, debris travel at 18,000mph. Even tiny paint flecks can create explosive crashes.
Approximately 4,000 operational satellites are currently in Earth’s orbit and the amount of space debris is already at a critical point. US and European Space Agencies track space debris and maneuver spacecraft to avoid collisions.
SpaceX’s Starlink plans to add 40,000 satellites in the next decade. There is no known solution for mitigating the space debris.
If the amount of space debris passes a critical mass, each collision will lead to more collisions in a chain reaction, known as the Kessler Effect. Ultimately, future spacecraft launches from Earth may become impossible.
VastWaste generates an everchanging Kessler Effect in conjunction with a data-driven soundtrack.
In this installation, satellites spin based on the speed of marine debris. This is calculated by using ocean currents and ocean winds.
The number of fragments falling into the ocean is tied to human use of satellites, symbolized by number of tweets per second.
Generative music varies in each play based on collisions, number of fragments, their contact with the surface of the ocean and their descent into the ocean.
Humans observe marine pollution with satellites, and we bury dead satellites into our oceans. The future of two vast spaces is entangled.

Özge Samanci, media artist and graphic novelist, is an associate professor in Northwestern University’s School of Communication. Her interactive installations have been exhibited internationally, including Siggraph Art Gallery, FILE festival, Currents New Media, The Tech Museum of Innovation, WRO Media Art Biennial, Athens International Festival of Digital Arts and New Media, Piksel Electronic Arts Festival, ISEA among others. Her autobiographical graphic novel Dare to Disappoint (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015) received international press attention and was positively reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate along with many other media outlets. Dare to Disappoint has been translated into five languages. Her drawings appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Slate Magazine, The Huffington Post, Airmail, Guernica, The Rumpus. In 2017, she received the Berlin Prize and she was the Holtzbrinck Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

The Linguistic Errantry

Tansy Xiao

The Linguistic Errantry is a stochastic sound environment and social experiment in a virtual setting. The viewers are invited to operate a first-person character with a game controller. 14 giraffes are set to randomly roam a surreal land full of symbolistic landscape and omnipresent surveillance cameras. Each giraffe is set to sing a measure constituting 2-4 notes and nonlinguistic lyrics deconstructed from L’Internationale. When two giraffes collide, they adopt each other’s measure to add to their own array. Giraffe 0 as the only exception, is set to speak “Control / Your / Soul’s / Desire / For / Freedom” by default, instead of singing—a propaganda phrase from a government official during the totalitarian lockdown in Shanghai, when the whole country entered an Agambenian “state of exception.” Each word occupies one slot in its array and will be gradually replaced by fragments from L’Internationale as giraffe 0 encounters the others of its kind. Other characters like the Goldfish, on the other hand, repeat their measures without interacting with one another every 3-7 seconds. The time between each repetition is randomized.

The state apparatus’s invention of new terms and phrases resonates with Victor Klemperer’s depiction of Nazism’s long-lasting influence on the German language in Lingua Tertii Imperii, that it “permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.”

As a lesser recognized fact, the lyrics of L’Internationale have different translations in different countries. While most parts remain accurate, the Chinese version has removed the third refrain and below, which begins with “The state represses, the law cheats / Taxes bleed the poor / No duties are imposed on the rich / The rights of the poor are empty words” for considerations of both simplicity and the potential inducement of questioning the state power. The fragments of L’Internationale in the piece were drawn from the erased refrain.

Due to the randomized routes in the program, the content of the audio array and the spatial relationship between each sonic element in the piece are also indeterminate with close-to-infinite combinations. The viewer can also move in the virtual environment to experience the piece from different perspectives. At a certain point, they will encounter a mirror and see the reflection of their own virtual body. In this piece, the goldfish in custody who jump higher and higher, crying for water, who are still unable to break through their invisible cages, represent the powerless civilians. Upon the recognition that their own body is a goldfish with a surveillance camera as its head, the viewer situates themselves in a dilemma; they’re both the oppressor and the victim—or they could be either, as in the Stanford prison experiment.

The Linguistic Errantry reimagines the Tower of Babel in a way that manifests the arbitrary nature of history: the consolidation and disintegration of sovereigns, an anticipated revolution to be generated by mere chance, or a parallel universe where nothing ever happens and only entropy reigns supreme. Contingency here serves as a passive approach of resistance, with a silver lining that in theory, like the infinite monkey theorem, the giraffes could sing complete lines of L’Internationale if given an infinite amount of time.

Tansy Xiao is an artist, curator and writer based in New York. Xiao creates theatrical installations with non-linear narratives that often extend beyond the fourth wall. Her work examines the power and inadequacy of language, furthermore, substantiates the multiplicity of being human through the assemblage of stochastic audio and recontextualized objects.

Xiao’s work has been shown at Queens Museum, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, New Adventures in Sound Art, Pelham Art Center, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Azarian McCullough Art Gallery, SRO Gallery among others. Her curatorial projects were presented by SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NARS Foundation, Radiator Gallery, Residency Unlimited, Fou Gallery, Chazan Family Gallery, Areté Gallery and Brooklyn Art Library.