RCAAP Repository

The introduction of new technologies to enhance the visiting museum experience is not a novelty. A large variety of interactive systems are nowadays available, including virtual tours, which makes cultural heritage accessible remotely. The theme of increase in accessibility and attractiveness has lately been faced with the employment of the service robotics, covering various types of applications. Regrettably, many of robotics solutions appear less successful in terms of utility and usability. On the basis of this awareness, a design for a new robotic solution for cultural heritage has been proposed. The project, developed at the royal residence of Racconigi Castle, consists of a telepresence robot designed as a tool to explore inaccessible areas of the heritage. The employed robot, called Virgil, was expressly designed for the project. The control of the robot is entrusted to the museum guides in order to enhance their work and enrich the cultural storytelling.

ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ – Belongings is an interactive tabletop using a tangible user interface to explore intangible cultural heritage. The table was designed for the c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city exhibition. This exhibition is a partnership of three major institutions in Vancouver, BC, examining the significant ancient village site on which part of Vancouver was built, as well as Musqueam culture and community today. The tabletop uses replicas of Musqueam belongings excavated from c̓əsnaʔəm, as well as contemporary objects that are a part of everyday Musqueam life to access information about the long history of salmon fishing and the continuity of related knowledge at c̓əsnaʔəm. The design of ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ – Belongings highlights the tensions between fragmentation and continuity that are central to discussions of access and preservation of intangible cultural heritage in the digital age. In this paper we discuss the tangible tabletop interface as a response to the desire to reconnect fragmented collections and physical belongings from c̓əsnaʔəm with Musqueam intangible cultural knowledge.

No summary/description provided

No summary/description provided

This paper presents a novel characterization of new media art together with an exploration of some key aspects of its practice: I propose that new media art’s defining characteristics are media appropriation and explicitation. With media appropriation I refer to the dialectal inscription into the art practice of the knowledge that allows for some particular technological production. I also propose that new media art’s language is constructed in part via the explicitation of certain aspects of more ‘traditional’ art, and that this explicitation allows for a construction of a new vocabulary. Examples of this are the explicitation of randomness, interaction, programming, or of the role that tools and instruments play, among others.

Digital technologies have become our privileged method of interacting with information. With their ubiquity, and focus on personalisation, optimisation and functionality, chance and accidental interactions in the Digital Medium are being replaced with filtered, predictable and known ones, limiting the scope of possible user experiences. In order to promote the design of richer experiences that go beyond the functionally-driven paradigm, we propose that digital systems be designed in order to favour serendipity. Through a literature-based analysis of serendipity, we explore the distinct meanings of value that are possible with serendipitous systems, offering examples of the current state of the art, observing the methods used to do so, and proposing a possible typology, while highlighting unexplored fields, experiences and interactions. 

The videos made through mobile phones are probably changing the way we think of videos created to tell or show something, both imaginary tales or private movies, or even chronicles of events to spread rapidly through the web. A change has already occurred in the use, as the new digital portable devices allowed to concentrate on a single medium a variety of media with various functions. Therefore, a tool like the telephone has been enhanced with new features typically designed for other media.In this process of appropriation, new mobile devices changed the way these new features are being used, due, of course, to new conditions. Other than multiplying the production of images that one would call "dirty" due to the presence of rough movements, continuous zoom in and zoom out and, of course, broadcast sub-standard video quality, the new tools introduced the practice of vertical shooting, so inducing a habit.In the history of photography, however, the two formats, landscape and portrait, have always lived together. This paper aims to analyze, briefly, a situation in rapid and continuous evolution, also characterized by the presence of new paradigms responding to visual aesthetic rules that are gradually being defined.

No summary/description provided

Fan translations are an important part of global fan subculture activity, intensified especially through the new media platforms which connect producers and consumers all around the globe. One recent trend within this category is that of English translations of Chinese online fictions. It is a newly emerging form of activity which takes place on blogs connected through a blogroll. Through these channels, fans comprising blog moderators, translators, and readers can engage in exchanges which add value to the appreciation of literature. Thus, it can be imagined as a ‘virtual settlement’ (Jones, 1997) after Anderson (1983)’s ‘imagined community’. Within this community, a further observation can be made about the mechanics of this practice. Like a game, the fans act as players where they negotiate rules regarding the production of translations. Given the community-centric nature of these websites, my paper outlines the formation of ‘illusio’, or “agreed rules of the game”, a concept introduced by Bourdieu. This is operationalised using Järvinen (2007)’s framework, locating the nine elements of a ‘gamified practice’ within the interactions of this community, known as Shusheng Bar. The findings suggest that members of Shusheng Bar possess a shared history and connected future. The significance of this observation assists in understanding the dynamics of online subcultures. 

No summary/description provided

No summary/description provided

No summary/description provided

Departing from the discourse on whether a specific (social, ethical) responsibility is attached to the creation and manipulation of algorithms, this article questions the prerequisite of having an identity of algorithms to which that responsibility could be attached. After showing that such identity is partly fictional due to the fact that algorithms are connected to other algorithms and their identity is always a selective reading of a series of transitions through which algorithms come into existence, the perspective is shifted to the algorithmic as the medium of algorithms and as the actual agential domain. This shift translates responsibility into the ability to respond to otherness and non-identity through sensitive forms of alignment. Comparing the algorithmic with the desiring-machines of Deleuze and Guattari, this article proposes that its dynamics of flows and interruptions could be artistically reflected as halting operations that controvert the superficial evaluation of algorithms, for example under the classical decision problem or halting problem. A possible strategy for making the inner dynamics perceivable is proposed through a balancing act between the credible and the incredible, the plausible and the implausible.

In conceptual art, the idea is not only starting point and motivation for the material work, it is often considered the work itself. In algorithmic art, thinking the process of generating the image as one instance of an entire class of images becomes the decisive kernel of the creative work. This is so because the generative algorithm is the innovative component of the artist's work. We demonstrate this by critically looking at attempts to re-construct works of early computer art by the re-coding movement. Thinking images is not the same as thinking of images. For thinking images is the act of preparing precise descriptions that control the machinic materialization of images. This kind of activity is a case of algorithmic thinking which, in turn, has become an important general aspect of current society. Art education may play an important role in establishing concrete connections between open artistic and more confined technological ways of thinking when thinking pro-gresses algorithmically.

The esoteric class of programming languages, commonly called esolangs, have long challenged the norms of programming practice and computational culture. Esolangs are a practice of hacker/hobbyists, who don’t primarily think of their work as art. Most esolangs are experiential works; we understand the languages by writing code in them. Through this action, the logic of the language becomes clear. However, a smaller subset of esolangs make their point not through actively writing code, but instead by simply contemplating their rules. We can think of these esolangs as conceptual rather than experiential. Some are designed in such a way that they don’t allow any code to be written for them at all. By stepping away from usability, the conceptual esolangs offer the most direct challenge to the definition of programming language, a commonly used term which is surprisingly unspecific, and usually understood through utility, despite the fact that programming languages predate digital computers. This paper delves into the conceptual esolangs and looks at their challenge to the idea of programming languages.

No summary/description provided

Focusing on the paradox of embodiment/ disembodiment in virtual space, and on the recent history of Net Art, this article proposes to go back to Roy Ascott’s metaphor of the ‘telematic embrace’ in order to examine different artistic and theoretical approaches to online affectivity. While the first generation of artists who founded the net.art movement was openly fascinated by the novelty of cyberspace as a medium, currently artists are adopting online tools to produce also offline works, revealing the presence of Internet culture in contemporary society instead of focusing on the nature of the medium in itself. In this scenario, marked by the current Post-Internet discourse, real and virtual worlds overlap, and hybrid artistic forms emerge. But are Net artists still reinterpreting the idea of virtual embrace? Or have they moved away from a romantic stance, highlighting the perils of the digital revolution in the so-called Post-Digital age? Adopting a phenomenological perspective, this essay aims to address these questions, exploring the paradox of affectivity in contemporary networked cultures through the analysis of emblematic artworks.

The sense of smell is closely related with people across time and space. The aesthetic, affective and evocative aspects of smell are widely portrayed in art practices. Olfactory art has its unique expression that other modalities hardly have. Yet this aesthetic medium seems to be underestimated when it comes to the digital age. Current digital olfaction researches mainly focus on meeting tasks and solving problems. The aesthetic experience and the meaning behind are seldom discussed. This paper proposes a potential area where the people from digital art and digital olfaction can contribute together. This paper firstly gives an overview about the affective and evocative impacts of scent on people across time and space, reviewing how scent is treated as the aesthetic medium in the art form, then examining current usages of olfactory display, and lastly discussing the opportunities lying ahead. It provides the way to appreciate the world aesthetically through this affective and evocative medium.  

The last few years have been strongly marked by the presence of multimedia data (images and videos) in our everyday lives. These data are characterized by a fast frequency of creation and sharing since images and videos can come from different devices such as cameras, smartphones or drones. The latter are generally used to illustrate objects in different situations (airports, hospitals, public areas, sport games, etc.). As result, image and video processing algorithms have got increasing importance for several computer vision applications such as motion tracking, event detection and recognition, multimedia indexation and medical computer-aided diagnosis methods. In this paper, we propose a real time cloud-based toolbox (platform) for computer vision applications. This platform integrates a toolbox of image and video processing algorithms that can be run in real time and in a secure way. The related libraries and hardware drivers are automatically integrated and configured in order to offer to users an access to the different algorithms without the need to download, install and configure software or hardware. Moreover, the platform offers the access to the integrated applications from multiple users thanks to the use of Docker (Merkel, 2014) containers and images. Experimentations were conducted within three kinds of algorithms: 1. image processing toolbox. 2. Video processing toolbox. 3. 3D medical methods such as computer-aided diagnosis for scoliosis and osteoporosis.  These experimentations demonstrated the interest of our platform for sharing our scientific contributions related to computer vision domain. The scientific researchers could be able to develop and share easily their applications fastly and in a safe way.

This study aims to develop a telemedicine platform for self-motor rehabilitation and remote monitoring by health professionals, in order to enhance recovery in patients after hip replacement. The implementation of such a technology is justified by medical (improvement of the recovery process by the possibility to perform rehabilitation exercises more frequently), economic (reduction of the number of medical appointments and the time patients spend at the hospital), mobility (diminution of the transportation to and from the hospital) and ethics (healthcare democratization and increased empowerment of the patient) purposes. The Kinect camera is used as a Natural User Interface to capture the physical exercises performed at home by the patients. The quality of the movement is evaluated in real-time by an assessment module implemented according to a Hidden-Markov Model approach. The results show a high accuracy in the evaluation of the movements (92% of correct classification). Finally, the usability of the platform is tested through the System Usability Scale (SUS). The overall SUS score is 81 out of 100, which suggests a good usability of the Web application. Further work will focus on the development of additional functionalities and an evaluation of the impact of the platform on the recovery process.