RCAAP Repository

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This paper explores the potential of active matter, from a practical exploration of the concept to a theoretical discussion based on the material findings. It begins by addressing the ideas of materiality and material performance through the project “Chrysalis Gemini” and then provides an overview of the notion of programmability.To this end, we move to the description and analysis of programming, focusing on its relationship with hardware, software and material. In particular, we address the idea of programmable matter, and we introduce the term processuality. We consider the importance of adaptability, analysing the experience of humans, their interaction with the environment, with artefacts and with material within a design context.In this manner this study seeks to highlight how contextualisation and interconnected processes become relevant as a design argument. This is achieved by presenting the relational potential of processual material and things and their ongoing transformation.

Attempts to describe aesthetic artefacts through informational models have existed at least since the late 1950s; but they have not been as successful as their proponents expected nor are they popular among art scholars because of their (mostly) quantitative nature. However, given how information technology has deeply shifted every aspect of our world, it is fair to ask whether aesthetic value continues to be immune to informational interpretations. This paper discusses the ideas of the late Russian biophysicist, Mikhail Volkenstein concerning art and aesthetic value. It contrasts them with Max Bense’s ‘information aesthetics’, and with contemporary philosophical understandings of information. Overall, this paper shows that an informational but not necessarily quantitative approach serves not only as an effective means to describe our interaction with artworks, but also contributes to explain why purely quantitative models struggle to formalise aesthetic value. Finally, it makes the case that adopting an informational outlook helps overcome the ‘analogue vs digital’ dichotomy by arguing the distinction is epistemological rather than ontological, and therefore the two notions need not be incompatible.

What lineage connects early abstract films and machine-generated YouTube videos? Hans Richter’s famous piece Rhythmus 21 is considered to be the first abstract film in the experimental tradition. The Webdriver Torso YouTube channel is composed of hundreds of thousands of machine-generated test patterns designed to check frequency signals on YouTube. This article discusses geometric abstraction vis-à-vis new vision, conceptual art and algorithmic art. It argues that the Webdriver Torso is an artistic marvel indicative of a form we call mathematical abstraction, which is art performed by computers and, quite possibly, for computers.

This paper aims to discuss algorithmic art (also known as computer-generated or generative art) in a comparative perspective with artistic practices generated by means of non-computer-based methods. More precisely, it seeks to trace art-historical relationships between algorithmic art and certain examples from modern art movements. The artist whose works are chosen as the starting point for this investigation is the German artist Manfred Mohr. The investigation will firstly attempt to identify key features of algorithmic art based on its formal visual properties as well as production techniques involved. In the second step, it will discuss these observed characteristics in a comparative perspective with historical precedents and contemporary practices from non-computer art.  By comparing aesthetic principles and techniques used by selected artists, the paper seeks to contribute towards a growing awareness that it is necessary to consider algorithmic art within the broader historical context of its relationships with non-digital art forms.

This paper discusses the creative potential of the transmutability of digital data, while focusing on the exploration of textual material. It begins by addressing the conceptual and creative possibilities associated to the topic, and then discusses artifacts that imply or express transmutability as an artistic concept and method. To this end, we resort to a framework for the description and analysis of these artifacts, focusing on their conceptual dimension, on their mechanics and on the elements of their experience. In particular, we address the concepts they approach through the use of data in textual formats as source information or content, we consider the processes for its manipulation, and describe the resulting sensory manifestations while emphasizing their dynamics and variability. In this manner, this study seeks to highlight how transmutability becomes relevant as an artistic argument, by proposing aesthetic experiences that explore the ubiquity and heterogeneity of data in our contemporary world, as it becomes available in text formats.

Media professionals – such as news editors, image researchers, and documentary filmmakers - increasingly rely on online access to digital content within audiovisual archives to create narratives. Retrieving audiovisual sources therefore requires an in-depth knowledge of how to find sources digitally. These storytelling practices intertwine search technologies with the user’s ideas and production cultures. This paper presents qualitative research insights into how media professionals search in digital archives to create (trans)medial narratives, and uses the notion of creative retrieval to unravel the dynamics of audiovisual narrative production. Creative retrieval combines ideas about the effects of media convergence on media content, theories about serendipitous information retrieval, and studies of creativity to argue that retrieval practices of media professionals who create audiovisual narratives are governed by organizational, technological and content affordances and constraints. The paper furthermore exemplifies the first stage of an ongoing research project in which a user-centered design approach guides open source self-learning search algorithm development to support creative retrieval.

This paper looks back at historical precedents for how computational systems and ideas have been visualized as a means of access to and engagement with a broader audience, and to develop a new more tangible language to address abstraction. These precedents share a subversive ground in using a visual language to provoke new ways of engaging with about complex ideas. Two new approaches to visualizing algorithmic systems are proposed for the emerging context of algorithmic ethics in society, looking at prototypical algorithms in computer vision and machine learning systems, to think through the meaning created by algorithmic structure and process. The aim is to use visual design to provoke new kinds of thinking and criticality that can offer opportunities to address algorithms in their increasingly more politicized role today. These new approaches are developed from an arts research perspective to support critical thinking and arts knowledge through creative coding and interactive design.

In the past few years deep-learning AI neural networks have achieved major milestones in artistic image analysis and generation, producing what some refer to as ‘art.’ We reflect critically on some of the artistic shortcomings of a few projects that occupied the spotlight in recent years. We introduce the term ‘Zombie Art’ to describe the generation of new images of dead masters, as well as ‘The AI Reproducibility Test.’ We designate the problems inherent in AI and in its application to art history. In conclusion, we propose new directions for both AI-generated art and art history, in the light of these new powerful AI technologies of artistic image analysis and generation.

This article draws a perceptual approach to audio-visual mapping. Clearly perceivable cause and effect relationships can be problematic if one desires the audience to experience the music. Indeed perception would bias those sonic qualities that fit previous concepts of causation, subordinating other sonic qualities, which may form the relations between the sounds themselves. The question is, how can an audio-visual mapping produce a sense of causation, and simultaneously confound the actual cause-effect relationships. We call this a fungible audio-visual mapping. Our aim here is to glean its constitution and aspect. We will report a study, which draws upon methods from experimental psychology to inform audio-visual instrument design and composition. The participants are shown several audio-visual mapping prototypes, after which we pose quantitative and qualitative questions regarding their sense of causation, and their sense of understanding the cause-effect relationships. The study shows that a fungible mapping requires both synchronized and seemingly non-related components – sufficient complexity to be confusing. As the specific cause-effect concepts remain inconclusive, the sense of causation embraces the whole.

This article presents a series of works called Machinic Trajectories, consisting of domestic devices appropriated as mechanical drawing machines. These are contextualized within the post-digital discourse, which integrates messy analog conditions into the digital realm. The role of eliciting and examining glitches for investigating a technology is pointed out. Glitches are defined as short-lived, unpremeditated aesthetic results of a failure; they are mostly known as digital phenomena, but I argue that the concept is equally applicable to the output of mechanical machines. Three drawing machines will be presented: The Opener, The Mixer and The Ventilator. In analyzing their drawings, emergent patterns consisting of unpremeditated visual artifacts will be identified and connected to irregularities of the specific technologies. Several other artists who work with mechanical and robotic drawing machines are introduced, to situate the presented works and reflections in a larger context of practice and to investigate how glitch concepts are applicable to such mechanical systems.

We present a new media work, MediaScape, which is an initial foray into a fully interdisciplinary metacreativity. This paper defines metacreation, and we present examples of metacreative art within the fields of music, sound art, the history of generative narrative, and discuss the potential of the “open-documentary” as an immediate goal of metacreative video. Lastly, we describe MediaScape in detail, and present some future directions.

Departing from the concept of an Internet of Things (IoT) as a means to give voice to non-human ‘things’, the project Wildthings.io seeks to develop experimental prototypes for grassroots, community-run digital networks, and DIY electronic devices as artistic interventions. This article discusses the iterative design processes that concluded in the IoT artwork Papawai Transmissions, which imagines novel ways of understanding and (re-) connecting with disconnected streams, their communities and their ecosystems in urban Aotearoa/New Zealand, focussing particularly on slowness as a key method for designing in a more-than-human context, alongside openness and seamfulness.

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The dawn of computer data visualization launched a permanent challenge: the representation of objects with computers. Nowadays we expect to see and experience not just a mere representation of objects but realistic objects created by computers. This work is an ongoing experiment to demonstrate how we sought to represent artistic objects, rebuild and enhance their visual appearance, and reconstruct missing physical parts using of Computer Graphic tools. This multidisciplinary effort enables us to experience virtual artistic objects and makes them available for uncontrolled and unprepared 3d environments like classrooms, museums, or wherever we intend to easily share digital contents.

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This paper analyses the experience of the networked off-line improvisation ‘Listening and Remembering’, a performance for four commuters using voices and sounds from the Mexico City and Paris metros. It addresses the question: how can an act of collective remembering, inspired by listening to metro soundscapes, lead to the creation of networked voice-and sound-based narratives about the urban commuting experience? The networked experience is seen here from the structural perspective (telematic setting), the sonic underground context, the ethnographic process that led to the performance, the narratives that are created in the electro-acoustic setting, the shared acoustic environments that those creations suggest, and the technical features and participants’ responses that pre- vent or facilitate interaction. Emphasis is placed on the participants’ status as non-performers, and on their familiarity with the sonic environment, as a context that allows the participation of non-musicians in the making of music through telematically shared interfaces, using soundscape and real-time voice. Participants re-enact their routine experience through a dialogical relationship with the sounds, the other participants, themselves, and the experience of sharing: a collective memory.

This study investigates the field of higher education and expertise development for learning and performing the double bass. The aim is to draw a picture of how the double bass is currently learned and performed by the learning student, the supervising professor and the performer working in a symphony orchestra, to find out whether if there were any significant differences between the three groups in their approaches to practice and performance. Results indicated that the achievement of expertise on the double bass is multifaceted and implies the development of multiple tasks and skills which soon have to be fostered and experienced in the field of learning and performing. Significant differences between the three groups were detected in the area of demography, experiences, knowledge, and their approaches to practice. Recommendations and implications for further investigation indicate that a wider perspective of learning, practice, self-evaluation in combination of the usage of technology for practice support and feedback should be taken into account for enhancing performance ability for the double bass.

The present article presents a doctoral investigation. It mainly focuses on an action research whose problematic is based on the search for didactic-pedagogical paths which contribute to intercultural openness and change within schools allowing for better social integration. We have chosen the trilogy music, arts education and interculturality to address the central problematics of this research. Therefore an Intercultural Musical Program was conceived, implemented and assessed in three Portuguese Elementary/Preparatory schools. The main leading forces guiding this Program are attached to four areas, which constitute the theoretical/conceptual frame of this research: Artistic education as a priority in education; • Intercultural education as a response to a growing cultural diversity; The role of music as an harnessing methodology for intercultural communication; Arts Programs as globalising impulses for human development and the preservation of cultural heritage. The empirical work rests on a methodology of qualitative analysis based on Renald Legendre’s (1993, 2005) model of Pedagogical Relationship (PR), combined with a strong influence of Visual Anthropology. The attained results are indicators of the high relevance and participation, as well as of the transforming impact of this action research, as a facilitator of intercultural communication and education among communities.