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With this text we intend to discuss the main theoretic issues connected to the problems of the conception and approval of public sculpture monumental projects, raised by of a series of four official competitions that were launched in Portugal, between 1933 and 1988, aiming to build a monument alluding to Prince Henry the Navigator, to be erected in Sagres Promontory, in the extreme south-west corner of the country. Covering a period of more than fifty years, because they retain the same thematic focus, these sequential competitions allows us to put in perspective the evolution and the involution, as well as the gaps and the links between the successive programs, and the winning solutions of each edition.

Ori Gersht’s new exhibition at IWM in London faces the subjects of violence and suffering in the Second World War. There are a series of photographs taken at memorials for Kamikaze soldiers at Hiroshima and two videos. One video is dedicated to the last journey Walter Benjamin took trying to cross the Spanish border and the other one is about a survival of Holocaust.

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The artistic use of error has a long history, and this essay attempts to reconstruct the genealogy of the relationship between artists and error. It then goes on to analyze the characteristics of technological error used in art along with the reasons for its appreciation by media artists and media activists. Finally, it contextualizes the practices of media art and media activism taken as exemplars in questions bound to contemporary technological power. The aim of this theoretical trajectory is to understand how error is used, for what purposes, and with what outcomes. Further, its goal is to determine whether and how the current popularity of technological error is bound to a certain relationship with technological power,[1] the characteristics of which are control,[2] regulation, prevention, and normalization.

The article studies tendencies in contemporary museum exhibitions and art display trends. While analysing current status quo of art in the museum context, it discusses the limitations of curatorial impact on the audience perception of the displayed objects. The paper presents a case study of a permanent museum exhibition with an added performance element. As argued in the article, such approach allows a stratified narrative and provokes a dialogue between the audience, performers, and curators, fully reflecting postmodern polyphonic tendency. The aim of the article is to comment on postmodern trends in museology, the status of the displayed art (object), and contemporary exhibition identity.

This paper investigates the creative engagement with digital 3D models of museum artefacts and gives insight into new uses of museum collections enabled by digital scanning, editing and 3D printing technologies. Digital 3D models of museum artefacts are malleable and increasingly easy to use. Additionally, freely available 3D software has made 3D scanning, editing and manufacturing possible for non-specialists. These technologies allow users to create new artworks through the creation and transformation of digital replicas of museum artefacts. Examples of creative works, taken from two case studies that involve the creative use of digital reproductions of museum artefacts are presented in this paper. These projects are illustrative of a larger trend: the digital ‘poaching’ of heritage artefacts. This paper examines how digital 3D technologies can foster creative forms of museum engagement, democratise access to museum collections and engage users with personal forms of museum experience.

Blacksmithing in Benin City, Nigeria is of significant antiquity. The popularity and importance of the practice in the city is reinforced in the blacksmiths guild's attachment to the palace of the Oba, the traditional ruler of Benin people and their kingdom. This study examined the shift in paradigms and emerging trends in the practice. Based on the study of the blacksmiths and their products over a period of fourteen years, the study determined how the blacksmiths have responded to modern challenges. Findings indicate that a good number of the blacksmiths are multi-skilled in metal working and that they work with metals, other than iron, and employ modern tools and methodologies which were originally not traditional to blacksmithing.  The study also classified the blacksmiths’ products, most of which were also not traditional to their craft, into five categories: household utensils, farming implements, musical instruments, religious artefacts and decorative objects.

Although the concept of algorithms has been established a long time ago, their current topicality indicates a shift in the discourse. Classical definitions based on logic seem to be inadequate to describe their aesthetic capabilities. New approaches stress their involvement in material practices as well as their incompleteness. Algorithmic aesthetics can no longer be tied to the static analysis of programs, but must take into account the dynamic and experimental nature of coding practices. It is suggested that the aesthetic objects thus produced articulate something that could be called algorithmicity or the space of algorithmic agency. This is the space or the medium – following Luhmann’s form/medium distinction – where human and machine undergo mutual incursions. In the resulting coupled “extimate” writing process, human initiative and algorithmic speculation cannot be clearly divided out any longer. An observation is attempted of defining aspects of such a medium by drawing a trajectory across a number of sound pieces. The operation of exchange between form and medium I call reconfiguration and it is indicated by this trajectory. 

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In the reformulation of the ‘publication’ concept after the electric and then electronic revolution, there is a consequent reformulation of the ‘space of publication’ which finally transcends the page and the binding as the insurmountable limits.Here the history of this process is tracked through the first optical attempts to compress the content in order to overcome those limits, conceptually preparing for a more radical technological shift. Foreseen in early science fiction visions, this shift determined by digital and the networked technologies, is dramatically collapsing the publication space towards a dimension close to the infinite, where the published object disappears in the reading machine, in what becomes a mere but sophisticated ‘container’.

Transhumanist speculations have been present in intellectual circles since the 1960s. The term "transhumanism" was coined in 1957 by biologist Julian Huxley, who defined it as "man remaining man, but transcending himself by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature". Will the boundaries of aesthetics remain untouched in face of new achievements, both in medicine and those coming from the need to explore space? In 2017, NASA published the results of the Human Research Program. The aim was to find out more about the impact of long stays in space on the hu-man body, like manned trips to Mars. The human body will have to face new physical conditions on the Red Planet, such as lower temperatures, a less dense atmosphere, significantly higher radiation and many more. The impact of such conditions is visible and highly variable also in other organisms, including mammals that have the best sense of smell. 3D printing technology is developing continuously and already today we are able to print an ear that can be used for transplants. If this is the case, does it have to look the same? Based on the research regarding the impact of climatic conditions on the shape of noses as well as state of the art regarding such areas as mountaineering, biomimetics, plastic surgery and taking into account mental factors, the article presents original nose designs, aesthetic speculations and interpreting the above visual and formal data.

Design thinking (DT) has been widely promoted as a powerful approach for systematically achieving innovation, particularly in the world of management. Recently, however, some critical voices from design and science & technology studies have called bullshit on DT, accusing it instead of distorting and trivialising design methods and processes to serve purely commercial goals. Through an analysis of the recent history of design research and an overview of some (philosophical) accounts on the concept of “bullshit”, this paper shows that at least some of the criticism holds. However, it argues that a truly fruitful critique of DT needs to go beyond simple derision. Ultimately, this paper suggests that perhaps we should steer away from the idea that there is a designerly way of thinking, and focus instead on showing how designers, being “doers”, create maker’s knowledge. Designers, educators, managers, and anyone interested in understanding why design goes beyond a simple methodology perhaps might be interested in this account.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between gender and artificial intelligence, seeking to understand how and why chatbots and digital assistants appear to be mostly female. To this end, it begins by addressing artificial intelligence and the questions that emerge with its evolution and integration in our daily lives. It then approaches the concept of gender in light of a binary framework, focusing on femininity. These topics are then related, in order to shed some light on how chatbots and digital assistants tend to display feminine attributes. In an attempt to observe these aspects, an analysis of Alexa, Cortana and Siri is developed, focusing on their anthropomorphization, the tasks they perform and their interactions. Complementing this discussion, the project Conversations with ELIZA is presented as an exploration of femininity in AI, through the development of four chatbots integrated into a web-based platform, each performing specific tasks and simulating particular personalities, with the purpose of emphasizing feminine roles and stereotypes. In this manner, this study aims to understand and explore how gender relates to AI, why femininity seems to be often present in AI and which gender roles or stereotypes are reinforced in this process.

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This article discusses the role of Design Research in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Notably, the Research through Design (RtD) approach is proposed as a valuable method to develop HRI research artefacts due to the importance of having a physical artefact, a robot, that enables direct interaction. Moreover, there is a growing interest in HRI for design methodologies as methods for investigation. The article presents an example of a design process, focused on hands-on activities, namely sketching, 3D modelling, prototyping, and documenting. These making practices were applied to the development of Shybo, a small sound-reactive robot for children. Particular attention has been given to the five prototypes that led to the definition of the current solution. Morphological, behavioral, and interaction aspects were investigated throughout the whole process. Each phase of the design process was then documented with the intent of sharing potentially replicable practices and contributing to the understanding of the role that RtD can play in HRI.

This work presents a method for drawing Virtual Reality panoramas by ruler and compass operations. VR panoramas are immersive anamorphoses rendered from equirectangular spherical perspective data. This data is usually photographic, but some artists are creating handdrawn equirectangular perspectives to be visualized in VR. This practice, that lies interestingly at the interface between analog and digital drawing, is hindered by a lack of method, as these drawings are usually done by trial-and-error, with ad-hoc measurements and interpolation of pre-computed grids, a process with considerable artistic limitations. I develop here the analytic tools for plotting all great circles, line images and their vanishing points, and then show how to achieve these constructions through descriptive geometry diagrams that can be executed using only ruler, compass, and protractor. Approximations of line images by circular arcs and sinusoids are shown to have acceptable errors for low values of angular elevation. The symmetries of the perspective are studied and their uses for improving gridding methods are discussed.

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In this article, we intend to talk about the representation of black people in Brazilian cinema, pointing out how hegemonic images of Brazilian cinema corroborate the structural racism of our society, analyzing films (and other visual narratives) from the 2000s, a period considered the "Resumption of Brazilian Cinema". Cinema produced by black directors emerges as counter-narratives, deepening the way in which Brazilian cinema represents the racial issue in Brazil in a stereotyped way. To think about this structural racism in the field of cinema we will deepen the concept of racial anthropophagy (Amparo, 2018; Paixão, 2015) a kind of aesthetic of the flesh, in which the image of the "other" (the black or black) is appropriate and devoured in the name of art. We will also seek to dialogue with black feminism in Brazil, emphasizing the specificity of this field and discussing image production around black women in Brazil.

This paper explores how both sound and image of a documentary under production footage can serve as a narrative tool for a sound-oriented video art piece (‘Folkofolk’), and at the same time communicate the ideas of the final documentary itself. It discusses possible uses of existing footage derived from an ethnographic documentary in production, which maps and records the existence of German-speaking folk dancing groups. The information of the gathered original footage seeks to understand how the notion of place is interpreted through the folk dancing soundscape as a whole, and wishes to highlight the everyday sound's social character. The footage of ‘Folkofolk’ features recordings of assorted German-speaking folk dancing groups in Berlin and Vienna. Based on the social properties of place, ‘Folkofolk’ seeks to explore, in a wider level, an alternative narrative of how folk dancing soundscapes potentially create a sense of place and community through creative film editing practices that are close to video art.