Randall Packer

mediation art, politics, global communications, media, social change

Mediation in the current art discourse is the process in which the different disciplines are employed in questioning, challenging and experimenting with new models and forms that propose social and political change. This presentation describes artistic strategies and methodologies developed over the past five years in conjunction with the US Department of Art & Technology, a virtual government agency created as a critique of the role of the artist in society and politics.

Nigel Helyer, a.k.a Dr. Sonique and Daniel Woo

art and science, collaboration, inter-disciplinary, spatial audio, sound-art, sound-installation, non-linear composition

AudioNomad is an interdisciplinary project that explores mobile, location sensitive immersive sound experiences for public art performances. This presentation will be presented as a conversation between Daniel Woo and Nigel Helyer, the two principal collaborators in the AudioNomad R+D project and will examine the philosophical, cultural and scientific elements of their work.

Shawn Bailey, Oron Catts, Jennifer Willet and Ionat Zurr

bioteknica, biotechnology, teratoma, cancer, organism, laboratory, tissue, virtual, performance, culture

BIOTEKNICA is a fictitious corporation, generating designer organisms on demand. Irrational and grotesque, our specimens are modeled on the Teratoma, a cancerous multi-tissue growth. Initially virtual, our organisms are now under laboratory development using living tissue. BIOTEKNICA both embraces and critiques biotechnology, considering the contradictions and complexities that these technologies offer the future of humanity.

Angelo Vermeulen

art, science, interactive, installation, bio ecology, evolution, Darwin, transdisciplinary, light

Angelo Vermeulen, artist and biologist will present Blue Shift [LOG. x], a Darwinian art project realized together with biologist Luc De Meester (University of Leuven, Belgium) and engineers from Philips. The project consists of an interactive installation piece with an evolving model ecosystem at its core. Visitors induce a microevolution of the light-responsive behavior of water flea populations. The project aims to question the status of the utilitarian in art and science. Video footage, photos and biological data will be used to demonstrate the working process.

etoy.SILVAN: Silvan Zurbruegg, etoy.MONOROM: etoy MONOROM

public display system, collaboration, software, open source

Britney is the name of a system, that allows for creating simple choreographies from people’s digital material that can be publicly displayed. Individual screens can be composed out of images, movies, slideshows or texts. Multiple screen together form a play list that is preferably displayed with a beamer onto a public wall or canvas. The structure of Britney is quite simple, what makes for an almost zero training curve for content producers to get access to the system.

Tamiko Thiel

Pacific Rim, occidentalism, Orientalism, imagining the Other, artistic strategies of the imagination

The talk describes images, concepts and strategies that pre-modern artists in Japan and Europe used to "create" each other's worlds in their imagination. This material is the result of background research I did in Japan for my VR-installation The Travels of Mariko Horo, which will be exhibited in the festival.

Atteqa Malik

digital storytelling, Pakistan, vegetable cart, heritage, multimedia, community, culture, Karachi, urban

For this project, still under production, local community culture was interpreted for a global audience through my interactions. Multimedia is being used to bring all the participants together in one installation. With the help of digital technology I will be attempting to capture, then present some integral contributions that the presence of the vegetable-cart and its owner has made to the communities of Karachi.

Andrea Polli

eco art, sustainable energy, alternative energy, GPS, locative media, weather, meteorlogy, climate.

Eco-media is the creative use of new media tools to connect to the natural world. Recent projects include digital media systems that respond to real time and model-based data describing the global environment. As was seen in the recent Tsunami disaster, thousands of lives can depend on the interpretation of global data, and Eco-media art explores how the interpretation of data impacts life aesthetically, socially and politically.

David Drake

iconic virtual architecture, re-imagined cityscape, navigable presentational space

Electric Pavilion is an online representation of a modern city overlaid on the real city of Bristol, in the United Kingdom, commissioned for the Creative Bristol celebratory year. The aim was to present the City's creative talent and energy in all its forms, but also capture the City's unique character - an intriguing mix of laid-back and edgy, cosmopolitan and introspective, welcoming and uncompromising. Not the city of Bristol in a literal sense - but a re-imagined city seen through the eyes of its creative community.

Pia Tikka, Rasmus Vuori, Joonas Juutilainen

embodied mind, cognition, emotion, enactive cinema, generative narrative, simulation, psycho-physiological sensory interface, integrated senses, interdisciplinary cross-overs

The OBSESSION team introduces a novel kind of interactive cinema genre described as enactive cinema: How the narrative unfolds, depends on how the spectator experiences the emotional dynamics between the characters. In Obsession's core the Eisensteinian ”montage-machine” based on a narrative logic matches cinematic content with spectators’ psycho-physiological states.  The spectator’s unconscious emotional experience is connected to the installation’s real-time biosensitive montage-dynamics. In this manner enactive cinema enables fully immersive interactive cinema experience.

Tiffany Holmes

environment, information visualization, sustainability, resource conservation, real time monitoring, dynamic, animation

Eco-visualization technology offers a new way to dynamically visualize invisible environmental data. Eco-visualization can take many forms. My own practice of eco-visualization involves animating information typically concealed in building monitoring systems, such as kilowatts or gallons of water used. A public display with real time feedback promotes awareness of resource consumption. The long-term goal of most eco-visualization technology is to encourage good environmental stewardship through hybrid practices of art and design. The presentation will provide a critical survey of this emerging field.

Jill Scott

tactile communication, accessibility, cross-modality, navigation aid, audible city, visual impairment, RFID, gesture recognition, skin perception, ergonomics, GPS

Giselle Beiguelman

nomadism, cybridism, interface, global city, public art

All the projects I will discuss in this presentation happened in networked environments, dealing with collective forms of appropriation of the advertisement system as public space. They allow us to think about aesthetics of transmission and to discuss public art in a nomadic context where the interface becomes the message.

Julie Andreyev

interactive, mobile vj/dj, public, urban, cars, sound, video

 Julie Andreyev will present her internationally performed projects and her current work in co-production with Banff New Media Institute. These projects examine urban culture through the use of cars as interactive, experimental VJ/DJ platforms. During performances, audio-visions of the city are repositioned into the public as performance and that which is private—the space of the car—becomes public and a tool for commentary about the city.

Mare Tralla

friendship, propaganda, network, songs, stories

Jody Zellen

Jody Zellen will present her recent interactive installations. In her work she explores architectural spaces as well as digital spaces, making projects that are both site specific and unexpected. Her works mirror the experience of navigating a charged metropolitan area. Through a bombardment of disparate images her pieces celebrate the complexity and unpredictability of urban space. A walk through the city becomes a vehicle for a meditation on space, time, and human interaction. Interested in the patterns, structure and design of the urban environment, rather than document the cities she sees, she employs media-generated representations of contemporary and historic cities as raw material for aesthetic and social explorations.

Stephen Wilson

biology, microscope, microorganisms, microbiology, motion-tracking, species, bioterrorism, identity

Introspection enables people to interact with microorganisms and cells derived from their own body in a non-invasive way. The contradiction of interacting with these alien, unfamiliar life forms (which are nonetheless intimately connected with our bodies) focuses on the boundaries between self and non-self and the cultural interest in bio-identification.  Reflecting on animal experimentation and the relationships between species, the Protozoa Games interactive installations allow humans and live protozoa to compete in a pinball-like environment mediated by digital microscope and motion tracking technologies.  If time allows, other projects in physical computing will also be discussed. More info:  http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson/

Olga Kisseleva

megacity, science, electromagnetic, flow, pollution, urban culture, graff

An experimental program, which creates a representation of landscape through the analysis of flows (stream) which cross a space (land), in this « landscapes » the initial scientific data are transformed into a visual information by urban graffers. Identity is defined especially by our position in the network, by the information which we emit and which we receive, we fix our attention on these invisible flows and we try to determine their importance, their form and their direction. Finical support provided by Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Consulate General of France in San Francisco.

George Legrady

data mapping, data classification, data visualization, digital multimedia art installation, the library as information, data exchange center

George Legrady will discuss the conceptual and technical realization of a data visualization project Making Visible the Invisible, commissioned by the Seattle Public Lilbrary.

The installation consists of animated visualizations on 6 plasma screens located on a glass wall horizontally behind the librarians' main information desk in the Mixing Chamber. The screens feature visualization generated by custom designed statistical and algorithmic software that map the flow of data received from the library's Information Technology center. The project focuses on data flow and the library as a data exchange center where the circulation of books can be made visible and expressed statistically.

Peter d'Agostino

techno/cultural, metaphor, interaction, human-machine, analog/digital, life, web, GRID, sustainability

Burak Arikan, Vincent Leclerc

social software, tangible media, interactive architecture, sensor networks, computer supported collaboration, social and economic networks

Open I/O is a suite of software services and applications for composing and running distributed physical media in a way that enables people to exchange data over the Internet. By using this system, artists and designers can collaborate and take advantage of high-level social and economic information while creating low-level physical interactions. By enabling social interactions through networked electronic objects, Open I/O lets people explore the intersection of material culture (things, physicality) and ideology (ideas, values).

Mathias Fuchs

urban planning, public domain architecture, urban space sociology, serious games, creative games

Shawn Decker, Ed Osborn, Nigel Helyer

sound, transvergence, Pacific Rim, audio sculpture, installation, performance, soundscape

SoundCulture is an international collective doing sound-related work that explores artistic and cultural contexts for this work outside of the traditional modes of presentation of music. For members of SoundCulture, sound is a transvergent medium. Presentation of sound in public works and installations involves objects and systems for producing sound, interactivity, and other modes of presentation associated with the plastic arts. SoundCulture practioners are increasingly object makers, programmers, and visual artists. In this panel discussion, SoundCulture artists will discuss this aspect of their current practices in particular, and how working from a background in sound informs these other activities.

etoy.VINCENT: Vincent Kraeutler

distributed storage, long-term archival, trust networks, social software.

Thom Kubli

The artist presentation focuses on a selected range of my works that relate to the implications of the interweavement of flows of digital data in the urban environment. The interplay of virtuality and materiality, the strategies of urban interfaces and physical anchors in space that interrupt and transform the flows of data to let experience “both sides“ of an urban reality are initial elements of the selected installation works. Different aspects of spatial perception related to the use of new media like peer-to-peer systems, cell phone- and surveillance technologies as well as the experimental use of the “old and loved“ radio transmission are highlighted. While confronted with this mediating instruments the human being with its elementary needs, its rituals and ability to subversion of sovereign power always stands in the centre of attention.

Ursula Damm, Matthias Weber, Peter Serocka

videotracking, self-organizing-map, isosurface, sculpture, temporary architecture, commuters, soundscape

This ever-changing sculpture is controlled by the occurrences on a public place. Like a naturally grown architecture this form is embedded into the contours of the immediate environment of the current location of the viewer. All these spatial elements are determined by mapping the traces of the visitors of the site according to their different walking-pace and according to their frequency of presence onto a SOM, which feeds a mathematical shape-the Isosurface that changes according to behaviour.

Paula Levine

transpositional mapping, hypothetical mapping, radical mapping, locative media, hypothetical spaces, GPS, GIS

"Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, ..." --From 'Regarding the pain of others' by Susan Sontag--

Robert Nideffer

pervasive, location aware, mobile phone, gps, game, blog, mapping, 3d engine

A mystical realist journey catalyzed by a series of interconnected events related to sexual infidelity, political conspiracy, and spiritual transformation. The project draws on the traditions of comics, graphic novels and computer games in order to create an environment that crosses boundaries between pop culture, fine art, and social critique. unexceptional.net incorporates an extensive database infrastructure for storing and delivering game-state data via Weblogs, GPS enabled mobile phones, and a 3D game clients.

Elio Caccavale

biotechnology, ethics, design, human/non human relationships, pets, pigs

Gorbet Design, Inc.: Matt Gorbet, Susan Gorbet, Rob Gorbet

P2P, community, installation, light bulbs, marquee, switches, research, participatory art, Power to the People

P2P: Power to the People is a metaphor for the enabling power of technology for individual expression. In creating this piece we've experienced first-hand the friction, the excitement and the unanswered questions that accompany bold new opportunities for people to engage. We will discuss what we've learned so far, having installed the piece in three fairly different cities and cultural contexts. We will relate the piece to the significant issues of accessibility, accountability, empowerment and oversight. In addition, we'll give a brief overview of the technical and user interaction design of the P2P installation itself: our goals with the project, how we achieved them, and what we'd do differently.