RCAAP Repository

Machine learning offers great potential to developers and end users in the creative industries. For example, it can support new sensor-based interactions, procedural content generation and end-user product customisation. However, designing machine learning toolkits for adoption by creative developers is still a nascent effort. This work focuses on the application of user-centred design with creative end-user developers for informing the design of an interactive machine learning toolkit. We introduce a framework for user-centred design actions that we developed within the context of an European Union innovation project, RAPID-MIX. We illustrate the application of the framework with two actions for lightweight formative evaluation of our toolkit—the JUCE Machine Learning Hackathon and the RAPID-MIX API workshop at eNTERFACE’17. We describe how we used these actions to uncover conceptual and technical limitations. We also discuss how these actions provided us with a better understanding of users, helped us to refine the scope of the design space, and informed improvements to the toolkit. We conclude with a reflection about the knowledge we obtained from applying user-centred design to creative technology, in the context of an innovation project in the creative industries.  

Computer assisted pronunciation training requires strategies that capture the attention of the learners and guide them along the learning pathway. In this paper, we introduce an immersive storytelling scenario for creating appropriate learning conditions. The proposed learning interaction is orchestrated by a spoken karaoke. We motivate the concept of the spoken karaoke and describe our design. Driven by the requirements of the proposed scenario, we suggest a modular architecture designed for immersive learning applications. We present our prototype system and our approach for the processing of spoken and visual interaction modalities. Finally, we discuss how technological challenges can be addressed in order to enable the learner's self-evaluation.

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Within the material-immaterial dichotomy structuring the creation of media artworks and its inherent informational aesthetic, one may observe fractures or continuities. Considering media artworks through the notion of translation of materialities, the aim of this paper is to analyse some of the multiple roles that absence play within and surround this sort of aesthetic experimentation. The discussion is unfolded through the articulation of Vilém Flusser’s media theory – namely considering the zero-dimensionality of electronic and digital media and the concept of Mediumsprünge. These concepts are exemplified through historical and contemporary media devices and artworks technically based on light-to-sound translations. The discussed examples were partially selected from references and methodological tools used in a cross-disciplinary practice-based PhD research on photosensitivity in relation to media history and media art history conducted between 2014 and 2018. The methodology combines a historical and analytical approach, through new materialism, media archaeology, cultural techniques and second-order cybernetics. The significance of the discussion is exposing both the artistic freedom (or emancipation) and the arbitrariness (and responsibility) implied in bridging the gaps involved in media artworks.

In many ways, humans in modern societies seem to be occupied to a considerable amount by a longing to establish whatever they do as if it were the first time any human has ever done it. The arts are full of this myth of originality and firstness. However, at closer inspection, there often appear events or activities by someone else that were at least foreshadowing what later appeared as totally new and the first time. The article takes up a few cases of this kind related to digital art.

The feature films by Flora Gomes: Mortu nega (1988), Udju azul di Yonta (1992), Po di sangui (1996), Nha fala (2002) and Republica di mininus (2012) narrate stories that speak of transits, music, woman, children, war, (neo)colonialism, cosmogony, life, death, love, birth, migration, of tradition, modernity, collectivity; using as scenario, the countryside, outdoors, with ironic, critical and metaphorical speeches. In this sense, the present abstract "I make films to be seen": an analysis of the film narrative of Flora Gomes" proposes emphasizing the elements of narrative cinematography of the fiction films of Flora Gomes present in the discourse, in themes, in the soundtrack, in orality, in time, in duration, in space, in camera movements, in the preparation of actors, in the work of illumination of the black body, in the scenery, not the visual metaphors of this director.

Under conditions of so-called “Platform Capitalism”, software and algorithms undertake the important task of designing the interaction amongst online users and establishing criteria of relevance for content. As such, they operate as curatorial agents of platforms’ content, establishing what is there to see, know and consume. This state of affairs calls for a revision of the traditional role of the (human) curator who is confronted with an online environment characterised by the unprecedented collision of commercial, aesthetic, cultural and political interests. The question of what kind of relationship the curator shall create with the algorithm then becomes crucial: is this a relationship of antagonism, resistance or alliance? How do these two curatorial agents influence each other? In this article, I analyse a cluster of hybrid artistic and curatorial experiments (including my own curatorial work) that foregrounds online platforms as discrete modes of socio-technical assemblages that curate particular forms of connectivity amongst networks of users, data layers and technical infrastructures. By doing so, I argue for the forging of strategic alliances between human and machinic curators as a strategy to channel new forms of creativity and cooperation under conditions of “Platform Capitalism” and to operationalise human-algorithmic curation as a political and aesthetic practice within the networked culture.

The development of automatic narrative systems has been largely driven by the engineering tendency to anthropomorphize the machine logic so they can ‘tell stories’ similar to how humans do. From the artists’ perspective, however, the experimentation with their media is often more important than the (plausibility of) storytelling, and it often unfolds in non-verbal events that have a potential to generate diverse narratives through experience of the audience. We discuss the emergence of the creative practices that enrich the poetic repertoire of new media art by playfully utilizing the machine flaws, irregularities, errors and systemic technical imperfections thus revealing the human biases and fallacies entangled with technology. One of the implications of these practices is that if the AI research opens up a broader space in which a machine could achieve its own authorial voice, our concept and understanding of the narrative would need to be reconsidered.

URB is a research project designed to collect and store raw data from soundscapes analysis. This paper presents a survey about using URB based on the analysis of work developed by several artists, focusing on the description of their creative process and outcome. By comparing the processes and statements of each artists, the authors identified diverse systematic approaches to reinterpreting raw data provided by urban soundscapes, raising questions about the artistic outcomes vs original sound sources. Furthermore, some considerations are inferred about the artistic relevance of using this process in the creation process.

This paper addresses the study of digital computational systems as aesthetic artifacts seeking to provide instruments for their analysis and critical understanding. What this aim implies is the need to articulate complementary perspectives for considering not only their specificity as digital computational (software-driven) systems, but also the different aesthetic intents that drive the creation of these artifacts, as well as the kinds of experience they propose. This approach entails articulating the viewpoint of their creation or poetics with the viewpoint of their experience or aesthetics, while tackling into their enacted processes. Accordingly, this paper discusses concepts, models and frameworks that not only argue on the distinctive processual nature of these systems, but also stress the interdependency of views on their principles, mechanics and experience.

Short Movies, by the Portuguese author Gonçalo M. Tavares (2011), is hard to define in the field of literary or artistic genres. There are no movies in this book, just verbal descriptions of possible movies, usually marked by intense violence; but these descriptions, in turn, resemble to cinematic scripts, suggesting a set of shots, camera movements, the grammar of a montage. In this hybrid way of writing, the film is an object that remains both present and absent, continually summoned and always deferred. What operation is then required of the reader of this book, what gesture between reading and seeing, what theory of epistemology, what kind of controlled hallucination? In short, this essay proposes that Short Movies invites to the development of a subtle and painful art of suspicion.

The idea of playing livemusic with someone abroad represents a major challenge for musicians and sound engineers likewise. Cognitive, technical and purely musical aspects make high demands on a network music performance that should fulfill conditions of a realistic rehearsing scenarios in the same room. In turn the idea of a network music performance has generally been considered as an impracticable application. However, a precise and comprehensive analysis has so far not been published, which equally issue_covers technical, cognitive aspects and their interdependencies equally. In order to give a final and valid statement about the feasibility of distributed real time music we take any of such relevant aspect into consideration and explain it accordingly to the reader. Finally we conclude that in recent wide area networks remote music sessions are possible assuming an awareness of latency conditions and appropriate interaction categories.

We present two examples of technology transfer from analogical to digital systems, in two works of live electroacoustic music by the Portuguese composer Jorge Peixinho (1940-1995), Harmónicos (1967) and Sax-Blue (1982). These works require the use of analogue technology that has become obsolete or difficult to access by the average performer. We think that migration from electronics to software, also referred as recast represents a necessary step to preserve live electroacoustic music. However, this process can pose multiple questions as it also relies on aesthetic considerations. In this case, we put on a considerable effort into understanding both the composer's intentions and the equipment operating mode and we think the solutions proposed are adequate to perform both works. Finally, we discuss some of the questions, solutions and limitations that arose with these recasts and how they can contribute to the sustainability problem concerning these works.

The goal of this research is to collaborate with a number of different artists to explore the capabilities of robotic musical instruments to cultivate new music. This paper describes the challenges faced in using musical robotics in rehearsals and on the performance stage. It also describes the design of custom software frameworks and tools for the variety of composers and performers interacting with the new instruments. Details of how laboratory experiments and rehearsals moved to the concert hall in a variety of diverse performance scenarios are described. Finally, a paradigm for how to teach musical robotics as a multimedia composition course is discussed.

A number of private societies and clubs flourished in Oporto in the 19th Century, whose aim was to encourage in their members "benevolence relationships and good society" offering them "an honest and civilized leisure times". Clearly elitist, these nineteenth century recreational clubs had strict membership admission policies, which generally belonged to the higher echelons of society, more specifically the bourgeois, since the titled aristocracy was scarce in Oporto. It is worth mentioning here in parenthesis that Oporto was an essentially bourgeois, commercial city, unlike the capital, Lisbon, where the court "drags with it the whole official and unofficial world which conceitedly flutters around it". Each association organised musical concerts, balls and soirées musicales – weekly, twice a week or once a month – which also offered members other amusements, like conversation, reading, playing cards or dancing. Events of a musical character were normally performed by the club members, usually amateurs – referred to as dilettanti – who would be joined by prestigious Portuguese or foreign professionals. The purpose of this article is to describe the musical activity of the five main venues for private socialising in Oporto in the 1800s, and their contribution to the development of the musical taste of the city's society, taking into account both amateur and professional practice and particularly the repertoire performed.

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Contemporary art, particularly that which is produced by computer technologies capable of receiving data input via interactive devices (sensors and controllers), constitutes an emerging expressive medium of interdisciplinary nature, which implies the need for a critical look at its constitution and artistic functions. To consider interactive art as a form of artistic expression that files under the present categorization, implies the acceptance of the participation of the spectator in the production of the work of art, supposedly at the time of its origin / or during its creation. When we examine the significance of the formal status of interactivity, assuming as a theoretical starting point the referred premises and reducing it to a phenomenological point of view of artistic creation, we quickly fall into difficulties of conceptual definitions and structural apories [1]. The fundamental aim of this research is to formally define the status of interactive art, by perpetrating a phenomenological examination on the creative process of this specific art, establishing crucial distinctions in order to develop a hermeneutics in favor of creation of new perspectives and aesthetic frameworks. What is interactive creation? Is interactivity, from the computing artistic creativity point of view, the exponentiation of the concept of the open work of art (ECO 2009)? Does interactive art correspond to an a priori projective and unachievable meta-art? What is the status of the artist and of the spectator in relation to an interactive work of art? What ontic and factical conditions are postulated as necessary in order to determine an artistic product as co-created? What apories do we find along the progres- sive process of reaching to a clarifying conceptual definition?This brief investigation will seek to contribute to the study of this issue, intending ultimately, and above all, to expose pertinent lines of inquiry rather than to provide definite scientific and aesthetic answers.

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