We live in the age of screen culture. The screen gives us a job and organizes our leisure time. The largest web services and their metaphors of the user interface are an important part of our everyday life. And our task is to make the familiar — strange.
This web application accesses the source code of the website and interferes with its logic. Each time it is implemented by a unique combination of methods. The algorithm performs about 1000 interventions per second, using 369 151 937 methods.
Dedicated to Netochka Nezvanova. In the 20th anniversary of nebula.m81.
Born in 1994 in Krasnodar, Russia, living and working in Saint Petersburg. Graduated from Krasnodar College of Electronic Device Engineering and the Academy of Marketing and Social Information Technologies with a specialty in “Computing Machines, Complexes, Systems and Networks”. Co-founder and active member of the Kiuss art-group. The main fields of activities are web development and book publishing.
Coping Strategies, curated by Sarah Grant, Critical Engineering Working Group.
@KIB, Kunstskolen i Bergen 17th-27th November
We are excited to present Coping Strategies, a new exhibition curated by Sarah Grant, Radical Networks. As part of the 3 years Piksel collaboration with The Critical Engineering Working Group, Coping Strategies joins the works of Lauren McCarthy, Juan Pablo García Sossa, Isaac Kariuki, Teresa Dillon, Shortwave Collective, Joana Chicau, and Adam Harvey. Coping Strategies is part of the PIKSELXX AI AI AI program, in Bergen from 17-27 Nov.
Sarah Grant in her curatorial statement, affirms that by now we begin to understand the extent to which our personal and professional interactions are mediated by the digital, from user interfaces to data harvesting networks of surveillance. As digital captives, we have little agency over our membership and the extent of our participation within these obfuscated systems.
How can we put some space between ourselves and these dominant structures? How can we push back and reclaim agency over the narrative that is written about ourselves and our communities by these intrusive technologies? How do we mitigate digital crisis?
Coping Strategies is a program of works, including presentations, workshops, and performances, that demonstrate artist-led approaches to recasting our role in the asymmetrical relationship between ourselves and the dominant providers of information technology.
By demonstrating concrete actions that we as individuals and as communities can take in response to these domineering information systems, Coping Strategies hopes to provoke excitement and reassurance that we don’t have to passively accept the default settings of our digital lives.
PROGRAM
EXHIBITION Nov 17th -27th – opening 18-21h – rest of the days 11-18h Futura Tropica by Juan Pablo García Sossa What do you want me to say? by Lauren McCarthy
TALKS Nov 18th – 11-13h @KIB Auditorium Futura Trōpica by Juan Pablo García Sossa Coding : Braiding : Transmissions by Isaac Kariuki VFRAME by Adam Harvey
PERFORMANCE Nov 17th – 19h Tango for us Two/Too by Joana Chicau
PERFORMANCE Nov 19th – 18h MTCD – A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life, Teresa Dillon
WORKSHOPS
Nov 18th &19th – 15-18h Open Wave-Receiver by Shortwave Collective
Nov 19th – 10-13h Messaging with lights in a not internet era! by Sarah Grant
Talks
VFRAME by Adam Harvey
VFRAME.io (Visual Forensics and Metadata Extraction) is a computer vision toolkit designed for human rights researchers. It aims to bridge the gap between state-of-the-art artificial intelligence used in the commercial sector and make it accessible and tailored to the needs of human rights researchers and investigative journalists working with large video or image datasets. VFRAME is under active development and was most recently presented at the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) Mine Action Technology Workshop in November 2021.
Adam Harvey (US/DE) is an artist and research scientist based in Berlin focused on computer vision, privacy, and surveillance. He is a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (2010) and is the creator of the VFRAME.io computer vision project, Exposing.ai dataset project, and CV Dazzle computer vision camouflage concept.
Futura Trōpica by Juan Pablo García Sossa
| Futura Trōpica | is an intertropical decentralized network of grass-root local networks for lateral exchange of local resources and other forms of Knowledges, Designs and Technologies. It plays with the narrative of the Wood Wide Web and the way trees are interconnected, communicate to each other and redistribute nutrients with the help of fungi as mycellium. It uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol to connect Rhizomes in Bogotá, Kinshasa and Bengaluru. Each Rhizome is composed of a raspberry pi-based wireless access point and web server in combination with a USB based distribution system similar to ‘El Paquete Semanal’ in Cuba.
Juan Pablo García Sossa — jpgs / Futura Trōpica Netroots (*Bogotá, COL) is a Designer, Researcher and Artist fascinated by the clash between emerging technologies and grass-root popular culture in tropical territories. His practice explores the development of cultures, visions, realities and worlds through the remix and reappropriation of technologies from a Tropikós perspective (Tropics as Region and Mindset). JPGS has been part of diverse research institutions and design studios and currently is a design research member at SAVVY Contemporary The Laboratory of Form-Ideas’ Design Department in Berlin and Co-Director of Estación Terrena, a space for Arts, Research and Technologies in Bogotá.
Coding : Braiding : Transmissions by Isaac Kariuki
CBT (Coding : Braiding : Transmissions) is a collaboration with Tamar Clarke-Brown as an experiment in speculative technology, combining the DIY practices of coding and braiding. CBT explores these two practices as tools for sending encrypted messages to escape totalising surveillance of black communities globally. The performance installation comprises of women braiding each others’ hair with a GoPro camera attached to their heads. The camera and accompanying software translates their hand movements into encrypted messages that the women send to each other throughout the performance.
Isaac Kariuki is a visual artist and writer whose work centres on surveillance, borders, internet culture and the black market, in relation to the Global South. His work has taken the form of image, video, lectures, writing and performance. He has exhibited at the Tate Modern, Kadist (Paris) and the Kampala Art Biennale among others as well as holding lectures at the Tate Britain and Yale University.
Performances
Tango for us Two/Too by Joana Chicau
<– Tango for Us Two/Too — > is a live coding performance that merges web-programming with the choreographic language of Tango. The script focus on the dialogical nature of Tango, using Google Translate with fragments of texts from interviews with Tango dancers and practitioners. It invites us to a pas-de-deux performed by the online interface and JavaScript functions which randomise search queries and present a series of (mis)translations. An algorithmic dance sustaining glitches between the techniques and poetics of Tango, each breath a step towards the emergence of a new vocabulary for the moving.
Joana Chicau is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance. In her practice she interweaves web programming languages and environments with choreography. She researches the intersection of the body with the constructed, designed, programmed environment, aiming at widening the ways in which digital sciences is presented and made accessible to the public. She privileges the use of Free-Libre Open Source software, and collaborates with various international practitioners in the fields of art, design and technology on both commissioned and self-initiated projects. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, discussions on gender equality and activism.
MTCD – A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life, Teresa Dillon
MTCD is a monologue in which the artist and researcher Teresa Dillon takes one “machine’ from each year of her life. From radios to home recording devices to her first experiences on the Internet, reflections on techs uses and misuses, failures and breakdowns, highlight the glitchy realities and contextual relations in which the key “machines” that shaped her technological know-how and imagination, play out.
MTCD originally premiered at Berlin’s transmediale in 2018 with further presentations in 2019. This updated but stripped back version is a special edition for PIKSEL 20th birthday.
Teresa Dillon (IRL/UK/DE)
An artist and researcher Teresa’s work explores the interrelationships between humans, other species, technology, cities and our environments. This currently manifests through three evolving programmes: Repair Acts (2018-) explores restorative cultures and practices by connecting past stories of care, maintenance and healing, with what we do today and how we envision the future. Urban Hosts (2013-) a programme that plays with civic conversational, encountering and hospitality formats and Liminal Routes (2020-) a mixtape and sonic tripping series for cities. Experienced in producing software and hardware projects, Teresa has also written on subjects such as open source processes, music, technology and design, sonic materiality’s and folklores, multispecies relations, surveillance, governance and the smart city, repair economies and artisan repair professions. As a Humboldt Fellow (UdK and TU, Berlin, 2014-16) her work documented artistic approaches to making the electromagnetic spectrum in cities audible. Invited to co-curate transmediale (2016) and HACK-THE-CITY (2012) for the former, Science Gallery, Dublin, since 2016 she currently holds the post of Professor of City Futures at the School of Art and Design, UWE, Bristol.
| Futura Trōpica | is an intertropical decentralized network of grass-root local networks for lateral exchange of local resources and other forms of Knowledges, Designs and Technologies. It plays with the narrative of the Wood Wide Web and the way trees are interconnected, communicate to each other and redistribute nutrients with the help of fungi as mycellium. It uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol to connect Rhizomes in Bogotá, Kinshasa and Bengaluru. Each Rhizome is composed of a raspberry pi-based wireless access point and web server in combination with a USB based distribution system similar to ‘El Paquete Semanal’ in Cuba.
What do you want me to say? by Lauren McCarthy
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.
Upon collecting and visiting the work, you are asked by my voice, “What do you want me to say?” However you reply, my voice responds by speaking your own words back to you. Then it asks again, “What do you want me to say?”
This work considers vulnerability, ownership, and authenticity in a time of rapidly advancing virtual reality. As I open access to my voice, I reflect on the ways femme voiced virtual assistants are commanded and controlled by their users and their developers. And the ways we can feel heard and (mis)understood by those that listen.
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.
Workshops
Open Wave-Receiver by Shortwave Collective
Building Open Wave-Receivers enables DIY communications reception, and allows anyone to freely listen to the broad spectrum of radio waves around us. All you need are a few easy-to-procure supplies and, if you want to try it, a neighborhood fence or other receptive antenna proxy.
Why a fence? Antennas are necessary for radios to receive signals, and many things can be antennas. Fences can make great, and very long, antennas! Other materials can work well too; even a tent peg can become a useful part of a radio. Open Wave-Receivers allow us to explore the relationship between different combinations of materials, antennas, and radio waves, creating a new technology literacy, a new medium for artistic expression, and a new way to explore the airwaves in our communities.
We have found making Open Wave-Receivers to be a fun adventure. The ability to use simple scraps to create variety and personalization in each radio makes this a great maker project for anyone wanting to play with radio.
Shortwave Collective is an international, feminist artist group established in May 2020, interested in the creative use of radio. We meet regularly to discuss feminist approaches to amatuer radio and the radio spectrum as artistic material, sharing resources, considering DIY approaches and inclusive structures. Members include Alyssa Moxley, Georgia Muenster, Brigitte Hart, Kate Donovan, Maria Papadomanolaki, Sally Applin, Lisa Hall, Sasha Engelmann, Franchesca Casauay, and Hannah Kemp-Welch
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/
Despite their lofty mission statements, today’s big social media platforms are centrally focused on one singular concept: more. These capitalistic software machines are designed to stoke a pervasive and ever-increasing cycle of production and consumption for the purposes of growth and profit. To accomplish this they leverage data and scale to produce signals and interface patterns that keep us engaged, promising connection and joy in exchange for increasing shares of our time and attention. The platforms embed within us the idea that our own sociality is best evaluated and understood through quantity. They reconfigure our sense of time in ways that can make minutes or hours ago seem old. And their personalized feeds teach our brains that the only content worth watching or reading is that which we can already imagine. In its tireless pursuit of users and data and wealth, big social media sacrifices human agency and potential on the altar of more.
But what if social media wasn’t engineered to serve capitalism’s need for growth? How might online collective communication be different if our time and attention were treated as the limited and precious resources that they are? Minus is an experiment to ask these questions, a finite social network where users get only 100 posts—for life. Rather than the algorithmic feeds, visible “like” counts, noisy notifications, and infinite scrolls employed by the platforms to induce endless user engagement, Minus limits how much one posts to the feed, and foregrounds—as its only visible and dwindling metric—how few opportunities they have left. Instead of preying on our needs for communication and connection in order to transform them into desires for speed and accumulation, Minus offers an opportunity to reimagine what it means to be connected in the contemporary age. The work facilitates conversation within a subtractive frame that eschews the noise and frenzy for a quieter and slower setting that foregrounds human voices, words, and temporalities. Though it may be disorienting at first to navigate an online social space devoid of the signals and patterns Silicon Valley uses to always push for more, Minus invites us to see what digital interaction feels like when a social media platform is designed for 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
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 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/
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 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).
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.
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.
