ISEA2015

For over a decade, human-computer interaction (HCI) research placed a great deal of emphasis on studying interaction, engagement, and appropriative practices in online technology-mediated social environments. Moving forward, however, we see computing systems increasingly designed to support digitally-augmented face-to-face interactions in public settings. As far back as the nineteen seventies, new media artists anticipated this interactive potential of digital public displays to foster new forms of situated interactions in urban space, quite distinct from mobile computing in that they altogether exclude online connections or exchanges. Drawing on examples of practice, here, panelists will discuss and showcase some of the key creative strategies that members of the electronic art community from all over the world have deployed in order to remediate interactive screen technology into a platform that disrupts the ordinary ebb and flow of modern city life.

This panel will create a picture of, then interrogate the tsunami-like effect of the expanding capabilities of moving-image capture and display and place this within a reading of history that proposes that technology comes upon us insistently like waves upon the beach - and that this situation is of our making for a very specific reason that the panel will explore.

The Panel will discuss critical modes of practice that have developed over the past two decades with a focus on whether (and to what extent) they reveal and disrupt surrounding narratives, beliefs or ideologies and/or instigate critical discussion while encouraging more active forms of intervention and agency. If works of critical design such as those of Onkar Kular and CohenVanBalen are created to foster greater collective and democratic participation through a critical practice aimed at social emancipation, we believe that what remains missing in the current context is a critical discourse that addresses if and how these different works meet such lofty goals. Contributors to this panel will provide their own unique perspectives on these issues in an attempt to create the very spaces of possibility for critical discourse. 

The constant transformation of communication media have been requiring new strategies, new planning methodologies for creative production. In consequence, a whole new concept of creative expression has emerged: the designing and scripting of media-based procedures intended for artistic re-invention, a process called meta-authorship. Following this tendency, those pioneering artists have gradually abandoned traditional functions as individual producers of texts, images and sounds. They can be properly called meta-artists. They have indicated that the rising author has to become a programmer, a designer, an architect of media sys-tems, a composer of media processes, to fully use the potential of new media technologies.

Our 21st century media environment has grown more immersive and predominant with the invention of communication technologies such as telephones, satellites, video cameras, and computers. We are all now electronically connected, able to communicate, observe, and react to what is happening anywhere in the world in an instant. How do we make sense of and trust these myriad electronic messages and their messengers, or even know or understand who or what is behind the code that creates and designs our mediated reality? More importantly, how can we have agency to disrupt and change the mainstream media’s dominant control over most of these messages? This panel will share our knowledge of disruptive media activism by examining its historical origins, current code-controlled aesthetics, and strategies to promote community-based digital storytelling.

This panel will bring together practicing artist whose work focus-es on environmental, ecological and living systems. The practices fall under many names: bio-art, environmental art, ecological art, systems art, are but a few. The focus of human and nonhuman relations however, resonates across these practices. In a time of pending climate catastrophe, this panel seeks to understand the role of art in revealing and understanding our place in the world. What can aesthetic experiences reveal about the ongoing, dynam-ic individuations in the world? How can art disrupt our anthropo-centric tendencies? In this panel, we will explore technological art as a means to understand environmental, biological and ecologi-cal data. The panel participants will discuss their work and indi-vidual approaches to these topics, followed by a panel discussion.

This panel invites curators from Vancouver and interna- tionally to share working practices around collecting con- temporary art, including media and new media art. The collections of museums, galleries, online art organisations and private individuals are increasingly broadening to in- clude more new media art.

New media art has both disrupted existing collecting sys- tems and offered now opportunities for rethinking who collects and how. Because new media art is sometimes non-material, process-based or involving audience partici- pation, how might these kind of practices be collected? What is actually collected (objects, beta software, instruc- tions?), where (online, offline, nomadic?) and how (com- missioned for collection, bought from art fairs, versioned from production labs?) Does new media art challenge, or become embedded in, the globalised nature of art markets?

Because new media is used as a means of documenting, archiving and distributing art, and because new media art might be interactive with its audiences, this highlights the new kinds of relationships that might occur between audi- ences as viewers, participants, co-producers, selectors, tag- gers or taxonomisers. Examples of current collecting prac- tice are given by all of the speakers. 

This panel explores artistic practices that reappropriate released and “leaked” United States governmental documents. The steady trickle of documents from Edward Snowden’s cache, alongside the mas-sive disclosures from Wikileaks, are only a small part of the regular release of documents via the Freedom of Information Act. This trove of material provides much fodder for artistic investigations into open culture, surveillance, counter-surveillance, drone warfare, and torture, among other topics. Nevertheless, the historical and contemporary artistic approaches discussed will focus more on poetic responses that upset a purely instrumental, objective analysis of the material. The panelists will explore a series of questions around the efficacy of the poetic in a time of objectification and quantification.

This session draws together the insights produced by SHIVERING, a three year, multi-disciplinary SSHRC funded investigation into the social role of objects, particularly art ob-jects, examined through the facetted lenses of art research, digital and multimedia art practice and contemporary anthropological theory. Building on the work of the British anthropologist, Alfred Gell, who pioneered ideas about art and the apparent animacy and social agency of objects, we have explored ways to expose the social affect of art and museum objects outside of aesthetics, commoditization and colonialist connoisseurship. Bruno Latour suggests devising a variety of specific tricks or artificial situations which ‘make them [objects] talk, that is, to offer descriptions of themselves, to produce scripts of what they are making others – humans and non-humans – do’ (2005:79). We argue that paying attention to the life and agency of art objects creates an oppor-tunity for a theoretically useful critique of modernisms and post-modernisms.

This panel describes the activities and presents the outcomes of artistic research carried out on the EMDL European Mobile Dome Lab Project, an international collaboration funded by the European Culture Programme (Strand 1.3.5). E / M / D / L has built an international network for the exchange of artistic and technological expertise, with the goal of researching and docu-menting a language and grammar unique to the full-dome medi-um. Bringing together four European and three Canadian institu-tions and cultural partners, all leaders in this field, the project aimed to share and expand skills, methodologies, strategies and content within this promising creative vehicle. Between February 2014 and September 2015, the participants took part in eight resi-dencies and public presentations offered in five countries, where a mobile domic architectural structure equipped with cutting-edge technologies was set up. During these residencies, a series of artistic experiments were conducted for the purpose of investigat-ing certain aspects of the creative potential of the fulldome as a medium. This artistic research activities also led to a series of works which were presented in May 2015 at the world’s most sophisticated virtual theatre, the Satosphere in Montreal, Canada.

Technology enables artists increase the complexity of artistic projects, such as when laborious techniques of preparation and production are automated. Animation is an example in which digital technology automates some of the process of production. However, technology has also disrupted the age-old paradigm of production before presentation. An example is the audio-visual performer, who harnesses technology in the pursuit of creating audio-visuals in real-time, fusing the process of design and presentation into the moment of performance. Such an approach has implications for the performer, the audience and the varied experiences that arise. The implications of their practice form the theme of our discussion: issues such as improvisation, controlling multi-media streams and the experience of the audience will form the core conceptual concerns of this panel.

In this round table discussion, curators and practitioners with diverse perspectives on game art and interactive media art explore the historical, cultural, and political stakes of exhibiting interac-tive new media works that incorporate game technology across a spectrum of experimental, institutionalized, and commercial con-texts. In response to digital games’ emergence as a powerful component of contemporary culture, large cultural institutions are beginning to collect, archive and exhibit videogames. The result-ing ‘blockbuster’ initiatives fall in line with established main-stream ludo-industrial narratives, but they do little to explore the roles digital game technology is starting to play in new media art practices. This panel considers the contributions of independent cultural initiatives (exhibitions, festivals, etc.) to this process of exploring game culture and game technologies beyond commer-cial and consumerist contexts. Drawing on their own practices, perspectives, and experiences with art-making and curation, the participants will engage in an open discussion on topics includ-ing: *historical gaming exhibitions; *early avant-garde game modification practices; *the institutionalization of experimental game art; *the rise of the new arcade and ‘indie game’ cultures; *the establishment of the practice of machinima; *the emergence of appropriative practices under the banner of ‘game art,’ and the use of game-like interfaces in new media installations. 

Key Questions Addressed 
• What are the implications of exhibiting games under the larger umbrella of New Media Art? 
• What curatorial methodologies are employed in the field? 
• What are the consequences of the disciplinary siloing that we can observe within game curation? 
• How can critical questions of interdisciplinarity be addressed within the field? 
• How can we unpack the problematic categories of ‘game art’, ‘art games’ and ‘indie games’? 
• How can we create critical historiographical investigations of the roles games occupy within gallery cultures, blockbuster ex-hibitions, festivals and alternative spaces? 
• What future contexts are possible in light of these histories? 

In this panel current issues concerning pain, art and communication are addressed. Suggested Speakers are: Ståhl Stenslie, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, Stelarc (to be confirmed), Diane Gromola (to be confirmed), Volker Morawe (to be confirmed) 

In our media society and social networks we are asked to react and communicate permanently. While this can be inspiring and helps us to share, care and heal via networks, such communication can also lead to information overload, exhaustion and chronic bodily pain. In the age of electronic connectivity, how do we now experience pain? And how does it affect us? In this panel we artistically deal with the connection between communication, sensory affects, bodily experiences and artistic experiments exploring these fields.

In an era in which state surveillance is capable of capturing, storing, and analyzing all personal communications, and in which even the much-heralded ephemerality of photographic sharing applications such as Snapchat is revealed to be just another instance of deferred, secreted permanence, erasure seems all but impossible. Yet this is precisely what makes erasure a vitally necessary artistic, technological, and social practice. Erasure provides a point of departure from network culture, from the constraints of big data, the archive, and the cloud; through erasure, forgetting and disappearance become radical, profoundly productive and disruptive acts.

This panel seeks to theorize the aesthetics of erasure across various media, platforms, and contexts in the digital era. Bringing together artistic and critical contributors from the forthcoming Spring 2015 issue of Media-N, the journal of the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association, on the special topic of “The Aesthetics of Erasure,” and chaired by the issue’s Guest Co-Editor Paul Benzon, we aim to consider the stakes of erasure for digital art and culture through consideration of a range of questions: What does it mean to consider erasure as an artist’s mark, and how does it reshape the relations between making and unmaking? How do acts of erasure allow artists to harness and resist the possibilities and problems of the archive, of (self-) surveillance, of public and private, and of datafication? What do practices of digital erasure, and the absences they produce, tell us about the materiality of digital activity?

This panel will discuss alternative models of arts education that have emerged from Roy Ascott’s career and practice. Ascott, the founder of the University of Plymouth’s Plane- tary Collegium, is widely regarded for his role as an arts educator and theoretician. In a field that integrates arts, technology and science, he has presented concepts and terminology that frame debates and define new territories. He has published and presented his work internationally, and given keynote addresses at several arts-science con- gresses, including ISEA.

It has been over 20 years since Ascott founded a radi- cal distributed research centre and doctoral program. He founded the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) in 1994 at University College of Wales Newport, and latter established STAR (Science Technolo- gy and Art Research) in the School of Computing at Plym- outh University. CAiiA-STAR constituted a joint research platform, with access to supervisory and technical re- sources at both universities.

In 2003, Ascott relocated the platform to Plymouth University, giving it its present name Planetary Collegium. The Planetary Collegium’s global reach extends beyond the UK through mimetic nodes in Italy, Switzerland and Greece, with a new node currently forming in China. Suc- cessfully graduating over 50 PhDs, the Planetary Collegi- um is host to a dynamic community of over 70 doctoral candidates and researchers.

This panel will discuss the singular aspects of Ascott’s pedagogical challenge to conventional models of advanced art research in Europe and North America. Its panelists will present a history of Ascott’s innovative curricula as well as the development and operation of the Planetary Collegium and its nodes. Finally it will demonstrate how Ascott and the Planetary Collegium have affected advanced studies in the arts beyond the Collegium itself. 

This panel will examine curatorial practice within a post- disciplinary framework; with a particular focus on the “liveliness” of media art objects and practices that situate themselves across, between and after disciplines. Bringing together curators of new media, as well as scholars work- ing within art/science frameworks the panel will explore the implications of such objects and practices for the future of museums, galleries and other cultural organizations as sites of knowledge production.

Over the past few years the panel conveners, Dr. Lizzie Muller and Dr. Caroline Langill have been conducting re- search around the “liveliness” of media art objects in exhi- bition contexts. This investigation, which has been funded by a SSHRC Insight Development grant, has its roots in theories of media art aesthetics and audience experience, but connects with the increasingly influential discourses of vital materialism and object oriented ontology. The grow- ing acknowledgement of the vitality and agency of things productively disrupts media art theory and curatorial ap- proaches. It challenges the specialness of media arts’ claims around categories such as interactive, responsive, autonomous and generative art. Simultaneously it allows for an expanded field of enquiry and exchange in which media art can escape its exhibitionary ghetto and form pro- ductive and provocative connections with an unlimited world of lively objects.

The panel will present the outcomes of a 3-day curatori- al research workshop, taking place at The Banff Centre in the week prior to ISEA 2015. This workshop, held as part of the Banff International Curatorial Institute program is planned to compliment the ISEA program and to capitalize

Caroline Langill

OCADU Toronto, Canada clangill@ocadu.ca

on ISEA’s international community of media art practi- tioners. The workshop will consider the notion of lively objects - including, but not limited to media art works - and their potential for disrupting the mono-disciplinary struc- tures of the exhibitionary complex. It will examine the agency of such objects within curatorial practice and audi- ence experience, and ask how we might reconsider modes and venues of display in response to this agency.

Sixteen participants will attend the Banff workshop and the following selected presenters will speak about their own work as well as reporting on the dialogue that oc- curred in Banff: 

This artwork investigates the Brazilian urban body through performance. Unifying concepts of new rhythmic musics and conceptual dance in performance, this painel uses artistic movements in Brazil that are suffering marginalization by breaking with the established aesthetic. Most of them brings a sensual and provocative body with political proposes. Small sketches with images and projections merging graphism with dancing and live music in order to analyze the potential of digital media. Musical matrix connected to traditional rhythms related countryside evolving everyday gestures, repetition with the gradual introduction of electronic music. Musical matrix connected to traditional rhythms related countryside evolving everyday gestures, repetition with the gradual introduction of electronic music in choreography-performance. 
We present a kind of critique of the new mass phenomenon in the Internet that becomes a fever and viral spreads music icons and, through performance and videoart, invite the public to think about society reality and the questions around contemporary music, dance and old paradigms. 

Depending on how you look at it, critical theory has been with us for some time. Its contents range from antiquity to the present, from the writings of Parmenides to Zizek, while it is largely a product of postmodernism and the critical turn in the humanities over the last thirty-five years. The new millennium brings with it exhaustion and renewal, global economic collapse coupled with the rapid-fire invention of disruptive technologies, all of which calls for the reevaluation of critical theory in terms of modernity reconceived. Altermodern, paramodern, modernity in the longue durée, or complexism: it is the contemporary time of not simply postmodernity’s past, but more importantly a union of art, architecture, and biology. Of these terms, we choose Philip Galanter’s “complexism” for two reasons. First, as a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism, it takes the best of all worlds. Second, it prioritizes the ecological paradigm of the complex biological system as means to rethink art, architecture, and the humanities broadly conceived.

We propose two panels – both titled COMPLEXISM: Art + Architecture + Biology, A New Axis in Critical Theory? – interrogating the concomitant disruption within critical theory that is the field of art, architecture, and biology. Building on past paradigms, from the Frankfurt School, Post-structuralism, and Deconstruction to embodiment, affectivity, and emergence, these two consecutive workshops unite artists, architects, and theorists to discuss the critical underpinnings of art, architecture, and biology now. Superseding any cultural divisions, each panel will be a mix of artists, architects and theorists. These two panels promise to open a discussion catalyzed by the following questions and more.

• Ø  How do bio-architecture and bio-art together transform contemporary critical theory?

• Ø  How does bio-architecture inform bio-art, and vice versa?

• Ø  What is the role of synthetic biology in helping us to understand “life” as

  it crosses the divide between living and non-living?

• Ø  How might the naturphilosophie of Goethe carry forth a politics of labor

  justice into the present?

• Ø  How does Max Bense’s information aesthetics provide a renewed means

  of understanding semiotics in terms of biological complexity?

• Ø  How does morphogenesis and computation transform the contents and

  definition of “form” within bio-art and bio-architectural practices?

• Ø  How does Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus bio-functionalism inform

  contemporary bio-art, bio-architecture, and critical theory?

• Ø  Might the biological concept of “autopoesis” approximate “performance”

  and performativity” in the arts?

• Ø  How does the generative aesthetics of computation resonate with

  generative biology and evolutionary development?

• Ø  Do bio-art and bio-architecture in the present carry forth the political

  purview of German Romanticism?

• Ø  What is the role of an aesthetics of complex systems thinking in

  contemporary critical theory?

  Invited panel participants:

• Philip Beesley, Founder of Philip Beesley Architect Inc. (PBAI) in Toronto,

  Canada and professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo

• David Benjamin, Principal Architect, The Living and Assistant Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York

• Juan Manuel Castro, Hideo Iwasaki Lab, Laboratory of Molecular Cell Network & Biomedia Art, Waseda University, Tokyo

• Dennis Dollens, Visiting Professor, BioDigital Architectures Master, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona. His most recent book is: Autopoietic Architecture: Can Buildings Think?

• Anna Dumitriu, BioArtist, Author of Trust Me, I’m an Artist: Towards an Ethics of Art

• Philip Galanter, Artist working in the fields of generative art, physical computing, sound art and music, complexity science, and art theory and Assistant Professor, Department of Visualization, Texas A&M

• Mitchell Joachim, Co-Founder of Terreform ONE and Associate Professor at NYU and EGS in Switzerland

• Morgan Meyer, Center for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech, Paris, France

• Patricia Olynyk, Director, Graduate School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis, MO

• Charissa Terranova, Associate Professor of Aesthetic Studies, University of Texas at Dallas

• Yvan Tina, PhD Candidate, Arts & Technology, University of Texas at Dallas/Aix Marseille University, France

• Zenovia Toloudi, Architect, Artist, Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth and Elected Member for Boston Society of Architects (BSA) 

This panel will explore university programs in Canada that integrate artistic-based and science/engineering-based approaches in holistic ways.

Digital games are so pervasive that they increasingly shape how people ascribe meaning to their world; in short, games are now culture. Similarly to music, literature, television, fashion and film, games as culture constitute "networks of meaningness which individuals and groups use to make sense of and communicate with one another" (Stuart Hall). Games expand the ways that we image our own possibilities, create empathetic connection, and seed ethical engagement with lived-world challenges and problems. Recent games 'culture wars', notably, GamerGate definitively confirmed that games traffic in the politics of representation, just as any other form of mass media. This panel examines the social functions of playable media as powerful forms of visual culture and ideological world making, especially as they relate to notions of difference.

This panel welcomes contributions in critical games research that model intersectional approaches foregrounding the politics of representation, and signifying practices of video games as new media and visual culture. Essays that consider the playability of specific games in relation to their signifying practices are of particular interest. Possible themes may include: representations of race, nation, class; issues of gender/sexuality; games and Diaspora/creolization; close textual analyses using critical studies and/or other disruptive and interdisciplinary approaches.

Artistic digital data visualization, as a field, emerged in the 20th century and continues to evolve. The distinguished panelists provide more than 100 collective years of experience in digital data visualization informed by artistic and design principles. Veterans who helped shape the field will share their perspectives on historical evolution and future trends. As panelists provide complementary, and sometimes contradictory views, they will introduce recent projects, identify promising research topics, elucidate funding issues, and collaborative arts opportunities. While there are both openings and closings, data visualization is a vital research area where artists continue to pioneer and collaborate to influence new global cultural directions. These panelists will dynamically engage with each other and the ISEA audience.

Through a dynamic interactive panel format, veteran art- ists, humanists, and scientists will share with and engage ISEA 2015 attendees. Panelists have collectively more than 100 years of lessons learned, wisdom, and bold visions of the future for data-artifacts in the age of digital media.

From complementary perspectives on the emergence and evolution of artistic data visualization, Donna Cox, Sara Diamond, Lyn Bartram, Roger Malina, and Lev Manovich, will provide a glimpse into the past and future of the field, addressing the funding issues, emerging research topics, and collaborative opportunities on the horizon for artists. 

 

Depending on how you look at it, critical theory has been with us for some time. Its contents range from antiquity to the present, from the writings of Parmenides to Zizek, while it is largely a product of postmodernism and the critical turn in the humanities over the last thirty-five years. The new millennium brings with it exhaustion and renewal, global economic collapse coupled with the rapid-fire invention of disruptive technologies, all of which calls for the reevaluation of critical theory in terms of modernity reconceived. Altermodern, paramodern, modernity in the longue durée, or complexism: it is the contemporary time of not simply postmodernity’s past, but more importantly a union of art, architecture, and biology. Of these terms, we choose Philip Galanter’s “complexism” for two reasons. First, as a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism, it takes the best of all worlds. Second, it prioritizes the ecological paradigm of the complex biological system as means to rethink art, architecture, and the humanities broadly conceived.

We propose two panels – both titled COMPLEXISM: Art + Architecture + Biology, A New Axis in Critical Theory? – interrogating the concomitant disruption within critical theory that is the field of art, architecture, and biology. Building on past paradigms, from the Frankfurt School, Post-structuralism, and Deconstruction to embodiment, affectivity, and emergence, these two consecutive workshops unite artists, architects, and theorists to discuss the critical underpinnings of art, architecture, and biology now. Superseding any cultural divisions, each panel will be a mix of artists, architects and theorists. These two panels promise to open a discussion catalyzed by the following questions and more.

• Ø  How do bio-architecture and bio-art together transform contemporary critical theory?

• Ø  How does bio-architecture inform bio-art, and vice versa?

• Ø  What is the role of synthetic biology in helping us to understand “life” as

  it crosses the divide between living and non-living?

• Ø  How might the naturphilosophie of Goethe carry forth a politics of labor

  justice into the present?

• Ø  How does Max Bense’s information aesthetics provide a renewed means

  of understanding semiotics in terms of biological complexity?

• Ø  How does morphogenesis and computation transform the contents and

  definition of “form” within bio-art and bio-architectural practices?

• Ø  How does Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus bio-functionalism inform

  contemporary bio-art, bio-architecture, and critical theory?

• Ø  Might the biological concept of “autopoesis” approximate “performance”

  and performativity” in the arts?

• Ø  How does the generative aesthetics of computation resonate with

  generative biology and evolutionary development?

• Ø  Do bio-art and bio-architecture in the present carry forth the political

  purview of German Romanticism?

• Ø  What is the role of an aesthetics of complex systems thinking in

  contemporary critical theory?

  Invited panel participants:

• Philip Beesley, Founder of Philip Beesley Architect Inc. (PBAI) in Toronto,

  Canada and professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo

• David Benjamin, Principal Architect, The Living and Assistant Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York

• Juan Manuel Castro, Hideo Iwasaki Lab, Laboratory of Molecular Cell Network & Biomedia Art, Waseda University, Tokyo

• Dennis Dollens, Visiting Professor, BioDigital Architectures Master, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona. His most recent book is: Autopoietic Architecture: Can Buildings Think?

• Anna Dumitriu, BioArtist, Author of Trust Me, I’m an Artist: Towards an Ethics of Art

• Philip Galanter, Artist working in the fields of generative art, physical computing, sound art and music, complexity science, and art theory and Assistant Professor, Department of Visualization, Texas A&M

• Mitchell Joachim, Co-Founder of Terreform ONE and Associate Professor at NYU and EGS in Switzerland

• Morgan Meyer, Center for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech, Paris, France

• Patricia Olynyk, Director, Graduate School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis, MO

• Charissa Terranova, Associate Professor of Aesthetic Studies, University of Texas at Dallas

• Yvan Tina, PhD Candidate, Arts & Technology, University of Texas at Dallas/Aix Marseille University, France

• Zenovia Toloudi, Architect, Artist, Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth and Elected Member for Boston Society of Architects (BSA)