RCAAP Repository

To polarize and, coincidently, intersect two different concepts, in terms of a distinction/analogy between “piano interpretation schools” and “critical models” is the aim of this paper. The former, with its prior connotations of both empiricism and dogmatism and not directly shaped by aesthetic criteria or interpretational ideals, depends mainly on the aural and oral tradition as well the teacher-student legacy; the latter employs ideally the generic criteria of interpretativeness, which can be measured in accordance to an aesthetic formula and can include features such as non-obviousness, inferentially, lack of consensus, concern with meaning or significance, concern with structure or design, etc. The relative autonomy of the former is a challenge to the latter, which embraces the range of perspectives available in the horizon of the history of ideas about music and interpretation. The effort of recognizing models of criticism within musical interpretation creates the vehicle for new understandings of the nature and the historical development of Western classical piano performance, promoting also the production of quality critical argument and the communication of key performance tendencies and styles.

This article is about the Portuguese tilemaking of the former Monastery of Santa Marta de Jesus, currently Hospital of Santa Marta, still in situ. The main goal is the study of the patterned tiles from the 17th century, exploring the documentation as well as the ideas and solutions invented by the tile-layers that applied the tiles on the walls. Also, the authors aim to introduce the new information system for the Portuguese azulejos’ inventory, named Az Infinitum - Azulejo Indexation and Reference System, available online.

Artists’ practices are varied. Two extremes include the need for complete solitude when working and others who seek social environments such as collaborations in communal studio settings. In addition to these real life studio practices new technologies and social media have made it possible for artists to use virtual studio practices in the process of developing creative work. Working virtually offers a range of interesting benefits for creative practice. This article explores the author’s recent experiences in virtual studio practices in light of the literature on this topic and considers the implications for creativity. It highlights five specific benefits in using virtual studio practices and considers possible limitations of working in such a manner. In exploring virtual studio practices and arguing the case for such ways of working, this article contributes to research and understandings about creative practice by discussing one artist’s reflective experience of using virtual studio practices.

In video games the player’s actions shape the narrative of their personal experience, molding what otherwise would be a linear course. This emergent narrative is in a state of constant transformation, dependent on how the player influences it. This paper explores how the players traverse ergodic media such as video games and how narrative emerges from the interactions between them and the system. In a previous text we have proposed three types of traversal in video games (Cardoso & Carvalhais, 2013): 1) that in which the player has the ability to choose between mutually exclusive paths; 2) that in which the player has the ability to expand the narrative; and 3) that in which the traversal is determined by the disposition of the other actors in the game world towards the player and each other. This paper intends to further contribute by adding another one: 4) a type of traversal that is rooted in the exploitation of any flaws and glitches in the system, allowing the player to traverse the game through an overlooked side of the algorithm, journeying through a world of unpredictable behaviours and events, that may ultimately break the game altogether.

This essay establishes a parallelism between the ‘Clavilux’, a silent colour-organ from Thomas Wilfred in the —beginning of the 20th century, and ‘Ufabulum’, an audiovisual live performance from the artist Squarepusher in the year 2012. It presents an overview of the analogies and synergies between sound and image in the recent history of music and visual arts, and connects both artists with almost one hundred years of audiovisual instruments, techniques and sound-image analogies, that despite the technical and creative evolutions, maintain the same concepts and dreams over time in the quest for high-sensory experiences and synaesthetic states.

Photographs, or images as the final result of a process, merely mark out the moment when the eye is helplessly limited to what it sees. Thus, what escapes the eye in the physical sense, i.e. what the eye will never see, is what occurs before the product- image, within the act itself. The latent image, the desire-image, unfolds throughout the duration of the photographic act. When the picture is ‘taken’, then the desire subsides until the next desire for another image arises. Based on the photographic experiment by Jerry Chan, member of a group of blind people, this article aims at rethinking the photographic act as the real- life experience of an impression process, leading the blind apprentice photographer to experience sightedness within his very flesh.

This paper highlights the art object nature as a theoretical anchor regarding contemporary virtual art, as well as traditional art practices, like painting. The analysis takes as a starting point the new immaterial status of the artistic object in the computer age. Despite the widespread prevalence in the analysis, our goal is to detach some key features as: meaning, intentionality and virtualization. These subjects prove to be related to each other and most of all, the link between intentionality and virtualization, brings forward the inconclusive nature of the art object and the decisive role of the spectator in the outcome of the creative process. Therefore, we acknowledge that the virtual fosters creativity, although remarking the lack of substance in some expressions of new media art. So, a final statement reassesses the importance of traditional practices, but now with the awareness of new media cultural logic, and its contribution to creation.

The orthodox view of the computer as a medium or medium of media (ie. “new media”) is perfectly justified in colloquial discussions, but is hardly evident as an objective fact. This does not imply that computers are employed in the making of art, rather we are investigating a means of initiating the occurrence of an artistic experience for the audience, with whatever tools are convenient, in this case computers. We leverage the feature that logical syllogisms can be articulated such as to create systems that act as catalysts for Constructivist learning to take place within the individual minds of audience members. These concrete, but unobservable synaptic adjustments are subsequently displayed via unpredicted idiosyncratic behaviours. In short, whether or not a computer can choreograph a dance, we describe how automated machines can coerce humans to dance. In doing so, we uncover mysteries as to the ubiquity and influence of art on our species.

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This study aims to discuss the work Duet for one Pianist (1989) by the French composer Jean-Claude Risset (b. 13 March 1938) by analyzing the challenges of the music performance of this Computer-Aided Composition work Disklavier and implies Human-Computer Interaction performance. Extremely honored to perform the revised version of the 8 Sketches for One Pianist and Disklavier within a research project of CITAR and a new Sketch Reflections (2012) by Jean-Claude Risset dedicated to me in a World premiere in the closing ceremony of Black&White 2012 Film Festival promoted by the Catholic University of Portugal. Several issues on the performance of this work are analysed as a case-study, from the point of view of the performer, particularly the components of expressive performance in a real-time interaction between performer and computer. These components can work as analysis criteria of a piano interpretation, in here, of a pianist and Disklavier interpretation. 

Computational technologies have significantly expanded the horizons of aesthetic creation; nonetheless, their wider ontological status as tools remains poorly understood. This limitation hinders our ability to assess their true impact on aesthetic practices and limits our means to establish the relationship between computer generated artefacts and previous forms of ‘media’. This paper argues that understanding and categorising the things computational technologies are able to do as aesthetic tools also requires understanding what type of tools they are. Following recent insights from philosophy of information and post-phenomenology, this paper begins by showing computational technologies are no ordinary mediators, but truly ‘multi-stable’ appliances which are leading us to reformulate our very notions of reality and self-understanding. While delivering a fully-fledged ontological model falls outside of its scope, this paper nonetheless suggests that within aesthetic contexts, computational devices may be initially described as information modelling appliances. This characterisation offers an alternative to their increasingly less adequate portrayal as ‘media’.

How do we define, discuss or assess aesthetics within a contemporary philosophical framework? The indefiniteness that accompanies attempts to formalize a definition of the aesthetic is a primary focus of this paper. This lack of a definition has occupied philosophers for hundreds of years in attempts to delineate the boundaries of an elusively formless concept. This formlessness speaks to the incredibly evasive character of such a pervasive feature recognized in both natural and artificial systems, agents and artefacts. With the rapid growth of artificially intelligent systems and an astounding diversity in computational creativity, in what ways may we approach aesthetics? How is the aesthetic recognized, determined and produced? This paper seeks to critically engage issues of non-human agency, inter-object relations, and aesthetic theory in relation to computational entities and autonomous systems. The ability of these systems to operate outside of human cognitive limitations including thought patterns and constructions which may preclude alternative aesthetic outcomes, afford them in some ways limitless potential in relation to aesthetics. The designation of the accidental or provisional is utilized as an alternative approach to the production and assessment of aesthetic occurrences of the non-human.

The ZoOHPraxiscope is a modified overhead projector that can be used to show cinematographic animations. It allows blending and mixing of animated shadow play with cinematographic animation. Similar to the Zoopraxiscope that was developed by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the 19th century, the ZoOHPraxiscope combines a rotating picture disc with a Laterna Magica and shutter mechanism. The mechanical shutter of the original device is replaced by a high-power LED that can be turned on and off at the fraction of a second. The overhead projector acts as Laterna Magica. This new device is used as a performance instrument to combine sound, vision, shadow play and animation.

In multi-agent systems, local interactions among system components following relatively simple rules often result in complex overall systemic behavior. Complex behavioral and morphological patterns have been used to generate and organize audiovisual systems with artistic purposes. In this work, we propose to use the Actor model of social interactions to drive a concatenative synthesis engine called earGram in real time. The Actor model was originally developed to explore the emergence of complex visual patterns. On the other hand, earGram was originally developed to facilitate the creative exploration of concatenative sound synthesis. The integrated audiovisual system allows a human performer to interact with the system dynamics while receiving visual and auditory feedback. The interaction happens indirectly by disturbing the rules governing the social relationships amongst the actors, which results in a wide range of dynamic spatiotemporal patterns. A performer thus improvises within the behavioural scope of the system while evaluating the apparent connections between parameter values and actual complexity of the system output.

Procedural systems allow unique modes of authorship and singular aesthetic experiences. As creators and users of these systems, we need to be aware that their aesthetic potential is not solely defined by interaction but that interpretation, and the capacity to understand and simulate the processes taking place within these artefacts is highly significant. This paper argues that although direct interaction is usually the most discernible component in the relationship between ergodic artefacts and their users, ergodicity does not necessarily imply interaction. Non-interactive procedural artefacts may allow the development of ergodic experiences through interpretation, and the probing of the system by its reader through simulations. We try to set the grounds for designing towards virtuosic interpretation, an activity that we may describe as the ergodic experience developed by means of mental simulation through the development of theories of systems.

This article emerges from the assumption that representing reality in documentary raises specific complex ethical issues. This is due to the fact that documenting an event partly results from the filmmaker’s mediation with the historical world. The choices involved in this process are subjective, biased and creative. In fact, representing reality results from a particular tension established between that which I represent and how I represent it. From this tension several ethical issues with regard to the filmmaker’s mediation with reality may emerge. This paper aims to revise and confront key literature on this subject to discuss and deconstruct the process of mediation and the ethical issues involved in this process. The key questions to answer are: What role does mediation plays in representing reality? What ethical issues may emerge from this process? Do filmmakers explore “others” to satisfy their own personal needs as artists? Is it possible to control or regulate filmmakers’ mediation with reality? Can we develop a set of parameters or strategies that can be considered ethically more appropriate for representing the world?

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