EXH-KIB

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).

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.

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

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.