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  This review of Nuno Barradas Jorge’s monograph The Films of Pedro Costa welcomes its detailed account of hitherto neglected dimensions of Costa’s work, such as funding, relations with producers, technological aspects of production and postproduction, and the promotional labour of Costa’s media interviews. But it argues that these undoubtedly useful insights come at the expense of sustained close attention to Costa’s striking imagery and use of sound. The most glaring absences in the book are those of racial and class politics, and hence the interface between the two. Jorge’s book is an important contextual study of Costa’s oeuvre, but the immense aesthetic and political power of this filmmaking (both texts and collaborative processes of production) still eludes his grasp.

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The increasing adoption of smart automation has improved people’s lives in several ways, but it has also brought a host of new problems such as deskilling, deepening of structural inequalities, new forms of exploitation, loss of privacy and hindering of human liberties. This paper begins by assuming that such issues are the consequence of poor design and takes the opportunity to analyse what “good design” should mean in turn. Following insights from mediation theory and philosophy of technology, it surveys the general inherent complexities of automation and argues that Human-Centered Design (HCD) continues to endorse an instrumentalist conception of technology. This paper shows that such a conception of human–technology relations significantly limits designers capacity to approach design from a genuinely ethical standpoint. The paper concludes with a sketch of principles that HCD should incorporate to become a truly humanist and ethically-minded design approach.

This paper explores the cognitive aspects of artefactual creativity in new media art. With regards to the diversity of practices in this domain, I focus on generative art projects created primarily by processing the material from cinema, television and the Internet. These projects blend procedural thinking with bricolage, leverage complex technical infrastructures, foster curiosity and encourage vigilance in our critical appreciation of the arts, technology, culture, society, and human nature. I discuss their methodologies, poetic features, cultural and social contexts in three sections which exemplify the effects and consequences of computational paradigm: database logic, statistical abstraction and quantification. Throughout each section, I outline the theoretical considerations that can be educed from the examples, and expand on them in the concluding section which examines the artists’ creative motives and circumstances for analogizing and meaning making in relation to the cognitive and ethical implications of generative new media art.

This book compiles revised and enlarged versions of conferences presented in October 2018 as part of a homage to the director, poet and teacher, that took place at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (ESTC-IPL), Lisbon; an enlarged biographical note by Fátima Ribeiro and also presents, by Maria Patrão, a series of slides from Reis’ classes unearthed from ESTC’s archives. As we will see, all the essays present a clearly aesthetical approach to Reis’ works as filmmaker, poet and teacher, which makes it unprecedented: Maria Filomena Molder and Manuel Guerra’s essays are mainly focused on the film Jaime (1974); Nuno Júdice analyses António Reis’ main poetry book and José Bogalheiro explores the relation between Reis’ filming praxis and his propaedeutic approach.

One imagines composed music as originating in the mind of an author. Indeed, I have for the last six decades been composing music in this fashion. However, for the last five decades I have also been repeatedly attracted to various methods of deriving music from sources both inside and outside of music, viz. linguistic, acoustic, visual and mathematical as well as other works of music. For most of these operations I have resorted to strict algorithmic means and the use of computer programming. For instance the linguistic: I have used text orthography, spectral analyses of human speech, digital recordings of the human voice, and synthetic semantic structures. This paper is the most comprehensive text on my work in this field.

Using William Heise’s The Kiss, from 1896, as a starting point, I created an experimental essay film, also called The Kiss, to expose and question our conception of obscenity. Comparing both films and the resulting reception of their audiences, and the history of obscenity, I strive to provoke a reflection on how our conception of morality affect artistic creation in today’s internet culture.

Assuming we consider that the film art isn’t merely a simple representation or expression, but that promotes a moral understanding, we are considering that the film acts as a contributing means to understanding the philosophical aspect of human beings. It is through films that we have access to stories and characters that lead us to analyze the way we live. Based on this idea, comes this audiovisual essay "The Imperfect Sides of a Perfect Circle", that explores the way that these moral aspects are translated to films, more explicitly how it is done in the film How to Draw a Perfect Circle (2009), from the director Marco Martins.

In the three short films Cinema, The Keeper and Flow, the director Rodrigo Areias utilises the cinematographic medium to establish a seamless relation between character and environment. All three regard different themes, but share remarkable similarities in style, concept and visual language, pointing to the concise work of the director. This essay, Movement, Framework, Cut, explores some techniques of video editing to analyse exactly how Areias masters the filmic landscape, through the movement of characters and the framework of the shots. Cutting between the three short films, and cutting the shots themselves, allows for a new perspective on how the various elements of the films flow organically together.

This article intends to provide a holistic review of Thor Magnusson’s Sonic Writing, presenting the authors’ historically-informed views about sound and music technologies. It starts by addressing the distinctions between the three categories of music-related inscriptions, in material, symbolic and signal form. It then reflects upon the parallelism this categorization has with the scope and topics within different conferences from the field of sound and music technology. Furthermore, it recounts the contributions of recent deep learning approaches in musical development, expanding on the books’ notions and offering an updated view concerning the specific purpose of automated music generation. Moreover, a contrast between the recent wave of AI-related technological developments and older scientific advances is discussed. Finally, driven by considerations about computational creativity in the field of music stated on Sonic Writing, this review propels a reflection regarding the role of machines in artistic creation.

This text proposes to think about the process of choreographic creation in an educational context creating a dialogue between artistic and philosophical creation, reflecting, in this way, how creation asserts itself as a practice of artistic education. It establishes a plan of discussion starting from the philosophical creation of concepts, with Deleuze, to choreographic creation. This approach underlines the resistance as a common action that is expressed differently in the two domains. Resistance as a tool that allows to reflect on the creative act in its theoretical and empirical aspects and to establish a bridge with the educational context. Baldacchino is called as an author who allows to examine the mechanism of resistance that is established in the articulation between artistic education and the School. Finally, the text projects to a practical plan of the choreographic creation process, underlining the importance of collaboration and devising among the agents of creation.

Austrian artist and director of ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, Peter Weibel (Odessa, 1944), curates a book/catalogue of the mythical exhibition Sound Art, Sound as Medium of Art, that took place between March 2012 and February 2013 in Karlsruhe, with nearly one thousand images of sound art pieces. Along with a very detailed historical trace of sound as a form of art, the book contains different texts and essays about sound and its history written by renowned and iconic figures in art all articulated in five main sections. A very important work for any artist or amateur interested in sound and music.

This review of Monica Gagliano's book Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants presents the author's unconventional scientific approach to plant ecology as a human-plant collaborative endeavour. As Gagliano's personal encounters with plants supported by indigenous wisdom changed her way of doing science, the scientist learned to think out and away from the conventional box of scientific determinism and abstraction from the subjective experience. Gagliano's journey led to groundbreaking scientific discoveries in acoustic communication with plants, probing their consciousness and capacities to listen, learn and remember. This book is an important contribution not only to the field of plant bioacoustics but also to any kind of academic work, revealing that a transformative knowledge lies in collaborative ventures with nonhumans as conscious subjects in their own rights. Learning by listening with plants, a common practice in indigenous cultures, is certainly a way to engage an active dialogue with nonhuman intelligences, but we must be willing to open our minds and transcend the view of plants as objects of scientific materialism.

When it comes to strategies governing contemporary technological culture, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) paradigm is as pervasive and automatic as technology itself. Taking from Michel de Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics, Ksenia Fedorova analyses a series of transdisciplinary artworks in which computerized operations affecting and transforming human experience are tactically disrupted in order to question technological interfaces mediating HCI. Exposing crossdisciplinary experiments in which affects and deffects are part of the algorithm, Tactics of Interfacing shows precisely in what measure and weight art and technology may contemplate natural and artificial glitches of both human nature and machinic code.

Julião Sarmento’s body of work crosses artistic disciplines and fields. The artist resorts to film and video as a means to reach the artistic expression of an idea, open to an infinitude of interpretations. This audiovisual essay looks at the way Julião Sarmento works with moving images, focusing in three main perspectives: the word, the (feminine) body and rhythm. We conclude that each one of Sarmento’s works builds a system of codes, of communication, that opens new understandings of the human relation with the ‘real’.

Networking in current music education and models, projects and platforms are a means for recovering the importance of music education as a part of artistic education. Music education has value in itself, both in the international and European context, not only from an instrumental or interdisciplinary perspective, but also as a critical reflection on reality, forming an integral part of society which cannot be removed. Art, due to its non-instrumental nature, constitutes a source of living standards and allows the development of the human sensibility which contributes to the acquisition of skills related with perception, and which make up valuable tools for the cognitive process of the science. Networking projects through music education contribute to diverse cultural thought, which places value on European cultural heterogeneity through music, promotes cultural integration and diversity of tastes beyond prevailing and homogenising musical trends.

This is an introduction to a special edition of JSTA dedicated to the myriad forms of sonic connections and audible expressions. We approach three dimensions of sound in an artistic context: auditory specificities, performance dimensions, and computational listening. Sound is a complex phenomenon present in everyday life and dwelling between conscious and unconscious processes. A universe contained within itself, where every sound event has the potential to be considered aesthetic material, contributing to the proliferation of creative approaches. These specific conditions have potentiated an outbreak of sonic art genres and expressions. Listening as an epistemic process has been subjected to successive changes pushed by computation and the breeding of computational media. This essay points to visions and approaches to sound as a specific field of knowledge that can arise from, lead to, or be used as a tool of world-building.

Music performance anxiety is an acknowledged condition amongst musicians from early learning stages to professional levels. Anxiety experienced in uncontrolled levels translates into the development of physiological and psychological symptoms that impair performance skills and may, ultimately, lead to post-traumatic stress disorders and drop-out of music-related activities. This paper focuses on teacher’s voices to justify the need for inclusion of anxiety management training in music schools’ curricula as means of promoting well-being, coping with stress-inducing situations, and boosting growing musicians’ performative experiences through positive pedagogies. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to four instrument teachers of a Portuguese institution of specialized artistic education to collect data about previous experiences, conceptions, and ways of teaching MPA managing. The importance of integrating coping strategies in pedagogical practices, its obstacles and benefits, alongside suggestions for conceiving viable intervention projects in schools were discussed by the interviewed and hereby critically presented with respect to existing literature.

This short piece analyses Pedro Afonso’s video essay on Roy Andersson’s Complex Image, an aesthetic style based on the tableau shot. It proceeds by scrutinizing the relationship Andersson’s aesthetic maintains with painting, slow cinema and political ideology, three aspects connected with realism, one way or the other. By focusing on the operative word “complex”, instead of “image”, this text claims that the Complex Image is not strictly pictorial; that long shots do not necessarily equate with slow cinema; and that there is a strong political engagement alongside an undeniably creative form.   

This article analyses an audiovisual essay created around the exhibition Julião Sarmento. Film Works, that took place in Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto in 2019. This exhibition reunited 10 works in film and video produced by the Portuguese artist in different moments of his career. Following the audiovisual essay’s structure, I will approach three thematic obsessions transversal to Julião Sarmento’s work, as a reflexive proposal about a gaze phenomenology (or a vision’s perversity), regarding dispositives that involve the moving image. Particularly, in what concerns the problematic of desire. These are: (1) The constant work of language (the real, the symbolic and the imaginary); (2) The fragmented body (the conscience/disassembling of voyeurism); (3) The rhythm (exposing the matter of time in favor of a deceptive aesthetics).