Month: November 2022

ORDER OF MAGNITUDE and/or DEFICIT OF LESS

Ben Grosser 

ORDER OF MAGNITUDE and DEFICIT OF LESS are video supercuts that examine Silicon Valley’s obsessions with growth. Both use as an archive every publicly-available video-recorded appearance by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the first fifteen years of the company. ORDER OF MAGNITUDE is assembled using three of Mark’s most favored words: “more,” “grow,” and his every utterance of a metric. Adding up just those words, the result is a nearly fifty minute film that reveals primary topics of focus for the tech CEO, acting as a lens on what he cares about, how he thinks, and what he hopes to attain. DEFICIT OF LESS asks a different question: does Mark ever talk about less? When the result of this extraction added up to less than 60 seconds of footage, I began to wonder: what might the world look like if Mark had thought about less as much as he had about more? I thus set out to reanimate the CEO into an alternate reality, expanding his less to be just as long as his more, taking those few bits of video and, instead of playing them in real-time, slowed them down to nearly fifty times their original length. How might the world be different if Mark had been this inert? This work uses Mark’s words to illustrate just how far our current reality must be distorted to equalize big tech’s obsession with more with its DEFICIT OF LESS.

Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political effects of software. Exhibition venues include Eyebeam in New York, Somerset House and the Barbican Centre in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, SXSW in Austin, Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, World Museum in Liverpool, Museu das Comunicações in Lisbon, Museum Kesselhaus in Berlin, Science Gallery in Dublin, Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, IMPAKT Festival in Utrecht, and the Digital Arts Festival in Athens. His works have been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, PBS, Fast Company, Hyperallergic, BBC, The Telegraph, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, Der Spiegel, El País, and Folha. The Guardian (UK), writing about his recent film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, said “there will be few more telling artworks [from] the first decades of this century … a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” Speaking about his social media-focused projects, RTÉ (Ireland) described Grosser as an “antipreneur.” Slate referred to his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” Grosser’s artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, and Investigative Aesthetics, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art. Grosser is an associate professor of new media in the School of Art + Design and co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. https://bengrosser.com

memoryMechanics

memoryMechanics, mads hobye, Lise Aagaard Knudsen

memoryMechanics is an interactive sound installation that explores how we as humans embody memories.

The installation is based on an archive of memories that are collected from different people, by guiding them through sensory experiences and into physical poses that trigger embodied memories. Their recorded memories are then stored in the installation for retrieval through imitating their initial poses.

Artificial intelligence is used to record and retrieve memories from the archive. Through the installation, a synergy between human memory and computer memory appears. Artificial intelligence creates a mediated physical space in which the audience can walk around, position themselves in poses and hear the intimate stories of previous participants.

memoryMechanics is created by Karen Eide Bøen, Mads Høbye, Lise Aagaard Knudsen, Maja Fagerberg Ranten and Troels Andreasen.

memoryMechanics is a collaboration between exocollective and the duo Knudsen Bøen under the group umbrella term memoryMechanics.

exocollective is a research collaboration initiated by researchers at Roskilde University. The main agenda is to develop an experimental approach to researching the potential of new technologies and materials: Speculative explorations in interactive design, art, and technology. Maja Fagerberg Ranten, Mads Høbye, and Troels Andreasen. (https://www.exocollective.com)

Knudsen/Bøen is the collaboration between the two artists Lise Aagaard Knudsen (actor and MA in Theater & Performance Studies) and Karen Eide Bøen (dancer and choreographer). They work with body memory and exchange of memories between artists and participants, and the transformation of memory material into various artistic formats in their project called “I remember…”.

memoryMechanics was initiated as a part of “Staging the Future of Technologies vol. 2” with the following partners: Click festival, Catch, Haut and Roskilde University Center. Sponsored by Bikubenfonden & Copenhagen municipality.

Mads Hobye holds a PhD in interactive design from Medea, Malmö University and is a co-founder of illutron collaborative interactive art studio. He is conducting research into the potential of digital material exploration within art and technology. He has a keen interest in maker hacktivism and experimental electronic upcycling. He is an Associate professor at the Department of People and Technology at Roskilde University Center.

Lise Aagaard Knudsen is a performer and theatre practitioner, based in Copenhagen. In her practice she explores the archive of the body alongside a close relationship between the performer and her audience. She works internationally, mainly in Scandinavia and the UK, teaches performance theory as an external lecturer at University of Copenhagen and works a producer at the dAnish residency center HAUT.
MA in Acting from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, and MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from University of Copenhagen.

Rewriting History: I keep forgetting faces

Malte Steiner

An important method to establish power is to rewrite history, to change the narration. In times of fakenews all sources of information should be questioned and handled with care and awareness of the potentials of content manipulation by different interested parties. This art piece takes as an example Wikipedia to retrieve automatically images and texts from their website and alter them, removing people with the help of Machine Learning from the pictures and manipulate the texts, the results are shown on a display in realtime. Retouching photos is as old as photography itself but here it is reflected on what is possible completely automatic and unsupervised. How can machines rewrite history?

Malte Steiner (born 1970) is a German media artist, electronic musician and composer. He started creating electronic music and visual art around 1983, developing his own vision of the interdisciplinary Gesamtkunstwerk. First exhibitions already in 1983. In 1986 Steiner took a course in electro-acoustic music in Lüneburg by H.W. Erdmann and gave his first concerts in the following years, e. g. in Germany, France and Belgium, and started 1987 to release his music on cassette, later on vinyl, CD and online.

In 1998 he began to create electronic art and installations and additionally in 2003 several netart projects including a collaborative visual networking environment, shown in the Java museum in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Besides diverse music projects Steiner is also involved in several open source projects and has done lectures, radio features and workshops. Artist-In-Residency i.E. in Open City (La Ciudad Abierta) Of Ritoque, Chile 2011 or together with Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen in Ii, Finland 2018.

2018 he relocated to Aalborg, Denmark and started in 2019 with the work on the new art project The Big Crash, art for the pending burst of the real estate bubble, reflecting on the housing crisis and gentrification. Art pieces are based on data which a software by Steiner harvest from online real estate ads. For instance images were segmented with the help of a Machine Learning algorithm and the resulting fragments were used for actual 3D printed objects but also in VR. Physical exhibitions of The Big Crash have been in Aarhus and Aalborg, Denmark and Bergen, Norway. The VR part has been shown i.E. at the Sound Campus exhibition of Kunstuniversität Linz at Ars Electronica 2020, at the ICMC 2021 conference, in the digital section of KP22 exhibition Aarhus 2022 and Rencontres Internationales Paris 2022.

Also in 2019 he started the conceptional phase of the project absolute power, macht + ohnmacht and painted first paintings. This project reflects on power structures and their mechanisms in politics and society.

Vis.[un]necessary force_1*

Luz María Sánchez

Vis.[un]necessary force_1 (V.[u]nf_1) addresses the subject of contemporary violence from the citizen’s experience. It derives
from shootings that people accidentally chanced upon recorded with their cell phones and posted on YouTube. With V.
[u]nf_1 we are merging interactive, participatory involvement of users into the emotional experience of violence with the
hybrid, networked space of multimedia installation organised with sound, space, sound sculptures, images, and texts.
V.[u]nf_1 design is interactive, participatory, and performative in several layers. [1] Interactive in terms of audience
participation as the visitors decide if they activate the gun-shaped sound devices. [2] Participatory in terms of production,
since the sound-data were generated by multiple individuals, who in this way contributed to the work. [3] Performative since
the visitor’s behaviours determine the experience of the artwork and depending on the extent of their interactions is the
outcome – which sounds plays when, how and for how long.
The archive behind V.[u]nf_1 is an element as important as the sound devices that play the sounds. The printed elements
consist of the detailed descriptions of the incidents – the sources of sounds | data related to the original YouTube files – as
well as a map of Mexico. Two different multimedia installations and a web-art project, emerged from this art-research project.

Luz María Sánchez is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and scholar. She holds a Doctorate in Art from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. Her artistic research extends to sound and language as a techno-scientific machine and builds upon environmental urgency. Sánchez received two consecutive Prix Ars Electronica’s Honorary Mentions (2020 & 2021) for her projects Vis.[un]necessary force #3 and #4. In 2015 she was granted the Climate Change Artist Commission by the Land Heritage Institute (Texas) and in 2014 she received the First Prize Award for the inaugural Biennial de las Fronteras (Mexico). Sánchez has authored four books, curated exhibitions and transdisciplinary conferences and presented by invitation at leading institutions such as the School of the Art Institute Chicago SAIC, the University of the Arts London UAL, and ZKM. With a professional career of +22 years, Sánchez has exhibited in Europe and the Americas, most recently at Vincent Price Art Museum VPAM, Los Angeles (2022); Ars Electronica, Linz (2021, 2020); MUAC, Mexico City (2019); WRO Art Center, Wroclaw (2019); CCCB/Hangar, Barcelona (2019); Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City (2018); and ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2017).

Pillow Talk

Miller Puckette, Kerry Hagan

Between 15 and 25 ugly throw pillows are distributed around a cheaply
furnished room, on couches, upholstered chairs, benches, futons, or just on
a plain concrete floor. The pillows whisper among themselves, very quietly, as
if waiting for a concert to begin, but occasionally in globally coordinated ways
more suggestive of a ritual. Visitors to the space might get the impression
that the pillows are whispering about them.

Dr. Miller Puckette (Harvard; mathematics) is known as the creator of Max and Pure Data. As an MIT undergraduate he won the 1979 Putnam mathematics competition. He was a researcher at the MIT Media lab from its inception until 1986, then at IRCAM, and is now professor of music at the University of California, San Diego. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University and the Technical University of Berlin, and has received two honorary degrees and the SEAMUS award.

Kerry Hagan is a composer and researcher working in both acoustic and computer media. She develops real-time methods for spatialization and stochastic algorithms for musical practice. Her work endeavours to achieve aesthetic and philosophical aims while taking inspiration from mathematical and natural processes. In this way, each work combines art with science and technology from various domains. Her works have been performed in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America.

Kerry is a composer and researcher working in both acoustic and computer media. She develops real-time methods for spatialization and stochastic algorithms for musical practice. Her work endeavours to achieve aesthetic and philosophical aims while taking inspiration from mathematical and natural processes. In this way, each work combines art with science and technology from various domains. Her works have been performed in Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas.
Kerry performs regularly with Miller Puckette as the Higgs whatever, and with John Bowers in the Bowers-Hagan Duo.
As a researcher, Kerry’s interests include real-time algorithmic methods for music composition and sound synthesis, spatialization techniques for 3D sounds and electronic/electroacoustic musicology. Her research has been presented in international conferences around the world.
In 2010, Kerry led a group of practitioners to form the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association, where she served as President until 2015.
Currently, Kerry is a Lecturer at the University of Limerick in the Digital Media and Arts Research Centre. She is the Principal Investigator for the Spatialization and Auditory Display Environment (SpADE) and President of the International Computer Music Association.

Process Pages

Nick Montfort

Process Pages is a collection of 21 very tiny Web pages that run live on three single-board Linux computers, driving three projectors. These are visual poems, artworks, and computational artifacts. They are not the typical sorts of Web pages that one visits when online, however. If anything, these non-interactive pages are more like demoscene productions that use the browser as a platform. They relate to sizecoding practices, with none of the pages being more than 180 bytes long. Unlike most demoscene productions, however, they explore Unicode, the nature of writing, the nature of poetry. They explore how rather obvious computational techniques can manipulate characters in a compelling way and use default fonts and the standard black-on-white presentation of text. As part of this installation, visitors are invited to take a single sheet with the complete source code of the 21 pages.

Nick Montfort is a poet and artist who uses computation as his main medium and seeks to uncover how computing and language are entangled with each other and with culture. His computer-generated books include #! and Golem. His digital projects include the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between. Montfort also studies creative computing. MIT Press has published his The New Media Reader, Twisty Little Passages, The Future, and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities. He directs a lab/studio, The Trope Tank, and is professor of digital media at MIT. He lives in New York City.

What do you want me to say?

Lauren Lee McCarty

Exhausted by Zoom calls, I created a digital clone of my voice to replace me. This voice allows me to puppet myself, using it to say all the things I hadn’t previously been able to embody. I feel a sense of power owning the data of my own voice. I am taking it back from the tech companies, constantly collecting my conversations, sampling and analyzing and archiving my speech for future use yet unknown. Instead, I offer the ownership and control of my voice to others.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance New Frontier, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica. Her work SOMEONE was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award, and her work LAUREN was awarded the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. Lauren’s work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as the Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Japan Media Arts Festival.