FRI 18 NOV

Prototyping DIY smart robots with Arduino and Machine Learning

Ivan Iovine

The workshop aims to teach participants the use of the Arduino platform in conjunction with the Ml5.js Machine Learning framework.

Each participant will be given a DIY robotic arm made of recycled wood, to which an Arduino will be interfaced. Through serial (WebSerial) communication, the Arduino will communicate with a Javascript application and the Ml5.js framework. Participants will be explained and taught the basics of Machine Learning, exploring and experimenting firsthand with pre-trained Machine Learning models for body recognition (PoseNet model), hand recognition (Handpose model), face and facial emotion recognition (FaceApi), as well as real-time object tracking (YOLO). Through the use of these Open Source technologies, workshop participants will be able to learn the basics of Arduino and Ml5.js, experimenting in a hands-on manner and creating customized human-machine interactions based on Machine Learning models.

Ivan Iovine is an interaction designer and media artist currently based in Frankfurt am Main. His artistic research focuses on the field of physical computing, physical interaction, machine learning and robotics. His works have been exhibited at “Maker Faire Europe” in Rome (2016), “JSNation Conference” in Amsterdam (2019), “Lab30” in Augsburg (2019) “Piksel Festival” in Bergen (2020) and “Die Digitale” in Düsseldorf (2021). In 2021 his work Theodore was published in the official journal proceedings of the scientific symposium “Art Machines 2: International Symposium on Machine Learning and Art”. The artwork was then exhibited in the same year at the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre in Hong Kong. He is head of the robotics lab at HfG Offenbach and teaches Physical Computing in the university’s art faculty.

Pleasure Force

dr. Nexus / Kris Kuldkepp

PLEASURE FORCE is a duo between Hamburg based bass guitar player and feminist performer Kris Kuldkepp and Berlin based sound artist and voice improviser Dr. Nexus.
Their performances are exploring the intersections of noise and experimental music, silence and loudness, visuality and materiality with a hint of pleasure.

https://www.kristinkuldkepp.net
https://drnexus.bandcamp.com

All My Piksels: A Momentary Archive, John Bowers Solo

We saw all the colours at The Flip-Flop Flop-Film Film-Club and learned our alphabet with Xerxes who Must Die, And So Must You And I (2011). Wearing god helmets, we made Experimental Communications, wrapping copper wire around our bodies and haunted rocks, and we transmitted to broken televisions (2012). We touched the bare pins of circuitry and microcontrollers to display The Peacock’s Tail (2013). We walked to where the witches were burned, the warship sunk, and followed the steps of the Isdal Woman as Bergen Invocation (2015). We used salt water to reprogram a Turing Machine which we saw and heard execute its algorithms in Turing Tape Music: The Sea Is Ground (2016). We prototyped The Universal Transformation Machine (2018). We walked there and back, there and back, there and back, there and back, while live streaming in LOOPS (2020) and The Rose Walks (2021). All My Piksels is a performance which revisits all the past works I have been involved with at Piksel, remixing and refashioning their ideas, devices, sounds and images, into a momentary archive.

John Bowers is an artist-researcher with an academic background in the social and computing sciences, design, music and critical theory. As an improvising musician, he works with modular synthesisers, home-brew electronics, reconstructions of antique image and sound-making devices, self-made software, field recordings, esoteric sensor systems, experimental film, and spoken text. He often combines performance with walking and the investigation of selected sites to research an imagined discipline he calls ‘mythogeosonics’. He has performed at festivals including the collateral programme of the Venice Biennale, Experimental Intermedia New York, Transmediale/CTM Vorspiel Berlin, Piksel Bergen, Electropixel Nantes, BEAM London, Aldeburgh Festival and Spill Ipswich, and toured with the Rambert Dance Company performing David Tudor’s music to Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest. He contributed to the design of The Prayer Companion – a piece exhibited twice at the Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and acquired for their permanent collection. Amongst many musical collaborations, he works with Sten-Olof Hellström, Tim Shaw, Kerry Hagan, with Paul Stapleton and Adam Pultz Melbye in the telematic improvising trio 3BP, and in the noise drone band Tonesucker. He helps coordinate the label Onoma Research, is a director of Allenheads Contemporary Arts, a trustee of Monkfish Productions, and a Visiting Scholar at SARC, Queen’s University Belfast. https://www.instagram.com/johnthemodulator/

Gravel

Malte Steiner (aka Notstandskomitee)

Malte Steiner (aka Notstandskomitee) performs the first concert with his new open source live coding system Gravel. A first beta of the software will be out during Piksel, latest by the end of this year. It offers synthesized and sampled instruments controlled by the expressive Gravel language which can generate complex evolving patterns with little code. The sound engine is backed by Csound which is compiled into Gravel as a library.

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.

Mimoidalnaube

Michał Seta

mimoidalnaube is a videogame piece for T-Stick (http://www-new.idmil.org/project/the-t-stick/), a Digital Musical Instrument (DMI). It uses the Sopranino version of the T-Stick, which is the smallest in this instrument family, and houses the following sensors: gyroscope, acceleromenter, magnetometer, piezo, as well as pressure and 12 touch sensors. It is an evolution of a DMI that has been in constant development for over a decade. This composition is a fruit of my participation in the second composers’ workshop for T-Stick, led and supervised by the inventors of the instrument, [[https://josephmalloch.wordpress.com/][Joseph Malloch]] and [[http://dandrewstewart.ca/][D. Andrew Stewart]]. It was an exciting opportunity to incorporate a DMI into my current practice of comprovisation. In recent times, I have been using a video game approach as a vehicle to music comprovisation and performance. Today’s game engines fit well my interest in physical modeling as a mediator in human-computer interaction, visual scores and visualization in the context of live musical performance. I use different techniques of game mechanics and interaction in order to shape the musical material. The visual composition serves both as a form of a score, which invites and guides physical gesture and, at the same time, conveys information about the state of the composition. The public is a witness to the audio-visual feedback between the performer and the work.

teaser video: https://vimeo.com/761318188

Michał Seta is a comproviser and researcher in digital arts. He enjoys juggling the tangible and the intangible, analogue and digital, sound and silence.

Biofeedback symphony – Solar Return

Jenny Pickett, Julien Ottavi

Using bio-electrode module synth inputs and DIY electronic bio-sensors we will interpret the soil, weeds, moss and fungus of Bergen. The sounds produced will be decomposed by an artificial intelligence for a quadraphonic audio experience. 

Stereo visuals, and upclose will catch aspects of live, electronics and organic matter. 

Since 2015 Solar Return have been working on the use of organic organisms such as plants and fungi in the processes of recycling e-waste, new DIY circuit development and how these systems create feedback audio transmission using moisture and decomposition of the circuit boards.

This begins with a few spores settling down on a nutritious surface. When these spores wake up in close proximity to one another they start germinating at approximately the same time and grow outwards as thread-like cells (hyphae) at a similar rate. The electronics feed on both the sun and wet soil, pregnant with (DIY) mycelium growth. As an information superhighway the interactions between a large, diverse population of individuals speeds up. It allows individuals who may be separated to communicate and help each other out. It also allows them to commit new forms of communication.

Solar Return

Nantes based artists Jenny Pickett and Julien Ottavi created Solar Return in 2009. Taking electromagnetic phenomena as a starting point for their audio creations. They have produced various scores for dual audio synths/oscillators/DIY electronics etc…which reflect patterns and electromagnetic events such as solar flares and inner city mobile phone masts, hidden sonic environments as well as the unfathomable audio world of kitchen appliances. Through their performances the duo tunnel deep into the world of frequency, static and sound as a physical experience, where they mix environmental recordings from the cosmos to pylons to Nuclear power plants with Live electronics and various antennas as instruments. Ottavi has been working with radio-art and open recordings since the late 1990’s, from performing with pirate radio transmitters or decentralised internet broadcasting, as well as giving workshops on the construction of electromagnetic antennas, receivers and radio-hacking. Pickett has been performing Live using huge VLF antennas as an instrument since 2013. Solar return plays with the physical space, the audience and the architecture of the venue to reveal and remix the hidden soundscapes present therein. Both defend the community of experimental music and arts, as well as FLOSS / copyleft attitudes through the project APO33, which Ottavi founded in 1997.

http://www.apo33.org

Solar Return has performed internationally at various events and festivals including Piksel Festival, Bergen (NO), Wave Farm, Hudson Valley (US), Main d’Oeuvre, Paris (FR), Transpecos, New York (US), Coaxial, L.A. (US), Harvest works, New York (US), STWST48 @ Ar Electronica in Linz (AT), Experimental Intermedia, New York (US), NeON festival, Dundee (UK), ACUD, Berlin (DE), IKLECTIK, London (UK), SONOSCOPIA Porto (PT), Kontactor in Riga (LV), CYCLE CULTURE CLUB in Crete (GR), Fylkingen (SE), OEIL DE L’ODAACQ FESTIVAL, Rennes, LUFF – Lausanne Underground Film Festival, Lausanne (CH), HTMLL’s Festival, Montreal (CA), LES ATELIERS CLAUSS, Brussels (BE), among many others…

http://solarreturn.bandcamp.com/releases

Ventriloquist Ontology

Afroditi Psarra

The continuous implementation of AI and ML systems in all areas of technological artifacts, including art, is challenging the ways in which we understand the world around us and urge us to consider other-than-human entities and ‘objects’ as equally important as human beings. In an exploration of such philosophical ideas that stem from the realms of Posthumanism, Actor Network Theory and Object-Oriented Ontology, ‘Ventriloquist Ontology’ encompasses the creation of a modular wearable, trained using Natural Language Processing to create its own personality that manifests in the form of speech and movement actuation. It explores the limits of control and points of hybridization between the human and the machine through the relationship of a performer and a wearable entity. This ventriloquist modular soft entity speaks through text generated using a GPT-2 language model, trained on a dataset of texts around biopolitics, algo-governance, the surveillanced body, and queer theory. Inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s dystopian theatrical play The School of Ventriloquists, this project manifests the idea of ‘soft control’ through the creation of a wearable that takes over the wearer’s body and converts them into a puppet whose movement is dictated by what they wear.

The softness aspect of this control refers to the plasticity of the interface, the malleability of its hardware connections (mainly soft silicones wires), the suggestive nature that the GPT-2 generated text pertains to, and the indicative nature of the movement of the actuators (some of them rather than radically moving the body, offer a suggestion as to how the body can follow their rhythm of actuation). Sequentially, it brings forth the soft data of the body inextricably linked to ideas of care and intimacy, as well as to the pliability of the different levels of interpretation between the human and the machine. The aspect of control is tied to the cybernetic idea of steering the body to its optimal movement through a feedback loop between machinic language, and human assimilation. It also deals with the hardness of the linear actuators and the microcontrollers that manipulate them, to the domination of these mechanical components over the softness and vulnerability of the human flesh. It asserts the supervision of the artist over the system, on the curation of the content of both the generated text, and its performative aspect. Ultimately, the idea of ventriloquism is used to give agency to an ontological entity comprised of subtle suggestive wearable modules, human flesh and cognitive motor abilities, born-digital, able to produce novel language, but also conditioned to reproduce the biases of its algorithmic parts.

Afroditi Psarra is a transdisciplinary artist and an Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. She holds a PhD in Image, Technology, and Design from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her research focuses on the art and science interaction with a critical discourse in the creation of artifacts. Her practice builds on and extends the work of Cyber and Techno-Feminism(s) and the idea of female (and feminized) bodies as matrices of information. Her work has been presented at international media art festivals such as Ars Electronica, Transmediale and CTM, Eyeo, Piksel, and WRO Biennale between others, venues like Bozar, Onassis Stegi, EMST (Greek Museum of Contemporary Art), Walker Art Center, and published at conferences like Siggraph, ISWC (International Symposium of Wearable Computers), DIS (Designing Interactive Systems), C&C (Creativity and Cognition), and EVA (Electronic Visualization and the Arts).

Taper, An Online Magazine for Tiny Computational Poems

Nick Montfort

Taper is an online literary magazine at http://taper.badquar.to. The magazine is now in its eighth issue and publishes tiny, stand-alone computational poems. They are tiny in that they occupy no more than a few kilobytes — the limit has been 2KB for several issues. They are stand-alone in that all you need is what is the single Web page of the poem; no Google fonts or connections to other APIs are involved. They are computational in that they are made of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, taking the form of interactive games and text generators among other things. They are poems in a broad sense, with many of the works featured not being in any human language. And they are all free software, available under an all-permissive license for study, sharing, and reuse. By publishing this twice-yearly magazine, edited by an independent collective, I hope to encourage people to explore language and literary art, and its intersection with computing, in new ways.

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.

Digital Culture & Cyborg Bodies

Idun Isdrake

Through a counter tactic perspective, with planetary accountability, Isdrake’s work and research prototype diverse human computer interfaces and narratives, aiming to limit bias in the development of new technologies and science (fiction). This includes working with datasets for AI systems, diverse narrative design, testing environment friendly solutions for powering and disposing of used technologies, as well as proposing inclusive interfaces.
The presentation will include Isdrake’s process for work with diverse and accessible design, and demo of a few of their art works.
The demos will mainly focus on implanted interfaces based on Near Field Communication technology (NFC. Isdrake has a couple of audiovisual experiences linked from its body, some developed with other organic or inorganic entities. Creating an endosymbiotic relationship between human flesh and other entities, an intimate dialogue only accessible through consent. Games, music and other expressions can be communicated through body modification, a human practice with ancient history, often connected to identity expression but also trauma and oppression. Embodied technologies and digital art as a voice for the silenced voices and disabled bodies, is one of the strongest motivations behind this work. The format is best live in a room, with soundsystem and projectors, where the audience can come close to see and demystify the hardware, and have a dialogue with the artists. Depending on budget and resources the demo can include a video installation. Research documentation https://imperceptible.space/

Idun Isdrake is a game designer, film, stage and transmedia director, moving in the inbetweens and unknowns, hacking forced power structures. Inclusion and diversity is at the core of its productions, ranging from computer games linked from its body, to film noir and landscape photography. Isdrake is the founder of Swedens first game and transmedia lab, The Collaboratory, as well as first game art gallery, Epic Unidragon. Their work includes many years of building a better infrastructure for digital culture in Sweden and globally, in dialogue with communities in hacker labs,  makerspaces, museums, libraries, the EU Commission, academia and various industries. Currently Isdrake is doing PhD research at Concordia University Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.

ShadowPlay

Dan Wilcox

ShadowPlay is an exploration of the architecture and light in outdoor spaces through sound. Using a bicycle-mounted smartphone as a brightness sensor and a bluetooth speaker, the mottled patterns of light and shadow become the musical score as one rides along city streets.

The project is realized as an open source iOS application which uses one of the device’s cameras as a brightness sensor. Custom audio scenes generate live sound in response to the changes between light and shadow detected by the smartphone. You can even create your own sound scenes using the Pure Data computer music environment.

Dan Wilcox is an artist, engineer, musician, and performer who combines live musical performance techniques with experimental electronics and software for the exploration of new expression. He grew up in the Rocket City, and has performed in Europe, Asia, and around the US with his one man band cyborg performance project, robotcowboy.