RCAAP Repository

Over the centuries, people have combined fields, leading to the creation of new domains. For example, artists have used technology to widen the range of their medium to express ideas in new ways. Similarly, technology has leveraged art to expand its range of application. Both art and technology continue to inspire innovation in each other. A contemporary example of this process is evident in interactive art era; this article covers this topic focusing on tangible interface pieces. There have been many compelling demonstrations that involve tangible interaction to increase audience interests through their embodied interaction. However, most existing approaches are limited to engaging a user’s immediate, temporary experience with setting some context of the environment with story elements. This article presents an interactive installation that engages the audience, building an immersive environment based on the synergy between embodied interaction and storytelling in a more active and meaningful way. It is based on the belief that tangible interfaces have the potential to convey narratives more meaningfully based on physical interaction and human senses and fundamentally, aims to supply another potential of tangible interfaces to spark further discussion in this area.

Multiphonics on the classical guitar is currently being researched by the present authors in regard to the reproducibility of the sounds originated and the suitability of the technique as a compositional element in writing for amplified guitar. Our hypotheses are to be tested, for which criteria for the data collection and treatment were established and are here detailed.

In this essay I introduce the notion of transducer function in the fields of electronic literature and digital art. Firstly, I survey the transduction concept throughout its history in such domains as physics, genetics, microbiology, biochemistry, physiology, psychology, philosophy, logic and computer science. Secondly, I discuss the relevance of a transduction theory versus the advantage of a transducer function. I migrate the transduction concept into the fields of electronic literature and digital art, showcasing the contexts of application, and several transfer processes and functions. Finally, I apply the transducer function as a theoretical typology and a recognizable system, highlighting some artworks by R. Luke DuBois, André Sier and Scott Rettberg that can be read within this framework. Thus, it means taking into account a set of transfer and conversion processes: information, patterns and data among mechanisms, technologies, themes, creative and theoretical guidelines. In this sense, I develop a critical framework that operates as a method for analyzing and comprehend further digital artworks.

The references for interpretation at the beginning of musical learning constitute the core of group piano teaching. Its stratification in technical, theoretical and tonal references enables an early, organized and effective approach to learning in which interpretation constitutes an agglutinating element. The systematization of positions at the piano, resulting from the organization of technical references, is central to this article since these are essential to the viability of the execution. The remaining references, theoretical and tonal, which are transversal, complete the theoretical frame discussed here. The proposed methodology, aimed at the 1st and 2nd grades of group piano teaching, it not intended to be unique but one of the methodological possibilities in an increasingly emerging area in Portugal, in which interpretation is the final goal.

This paper presents and examines several examples of digital interactive art in Japan. It analyses its roots in traditional East Asian philosophy, which grants the senses a prominent role in perceiving the world. By reflecting on traditional beliefs and contemporary art and technology in Japan, the essay reflects on the expansion of this culturally and traditionally inspired spirituality from its original context in the socio-cultural interpretation of the natural world to contemporary digitally mediated environments. The goal of this paper is to make explicit some of the main traditionally transmitted characteristics and historically conditioned approaches to technology and its use, focusing on multisensory experience. The treatment presents several multimodal artworks by Japanese artists, such as Ryota Kuwakubo, Masaki Fujihata and Kumiko Kushiyama.

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We present an overview and discussion of the Colloquium «Narrative, Media and Cognition», which took place at Porto's Centre of Catholic University of Portugal in July of 2015, under the organization of the Research Centre for Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR). Several scholars of different areas presented research about the uses and advances in narrative study and practice in a broad range of areas, giving some important insights about the latest developments in Narrative Studies, Ontology of Narrative and the uses of Narrative in Art, Cinema, Performance, Journalism, Marketing and Literature, among other fields. After briefly describing the main points of each presentation in the Colloquium we try to draw some conclusions and possibilities raised by the Colloquium and take a glimpse of future paths that the use of Narrative can end up taking.

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This paper explores the potential of active matter, from a practical exploration of the concept to a theoretical discussion based on the material findings. It begins by addressing the ideas of materiality and material performance through the project “Chrysalis Gemini” and then provides an overview of the notion of programmability.To this end, we move to the description and analysis of programming, focusing on its relationship with hardware, software and material. In particular, we address the idea of programmable matter, and we introduce the term processuality. We consider the importance of adaptability, analysing the experience of humans, their interaction with the environment, with artefacts and with material within a design context.In this manner this study seeks to highlight how contextualisation and interconnected processes become relevant as a design argument. This is achieved by presenting the relational potential of processual material and things and their ongoing transformation.

Attempts to describe aesthetic artefacts through informational models have existed at least since the late 1950s; but they have not been as successful as their proponents expected nor are they popular among art scholars because of their (mostly) quantitative nature. However, given how information technology has deeply shifted every aspect of our world, it is fair to ask whether aesthetic value continues to be immune to informational interpretations. This paper discusses the ideas of the late Russian biophysicist, Mikhail Volkenstein concerning art and aesthetic value. It contrasts them with Max Bense’s ‘information aesthetics’, and with contemporary philosophical understandings of information. Overall, this paper shows that an informational but not necessarily quantitative approach serves not only as an effective means to describe our interaction with artworks, but also contributes to explain why purely quantitative models struggle to formalise aesthetic value. Finally, it makes the case that adopting an informational outlook helps overcome the ‘analogue vs digital’ dichotomy by arguing the distinction is epistemological rather than ontological, and therefore the two notions need not be incompatible.

What lineage connects early abstract films and machine-generated YouTube videos? Hans Richter’s famous piece Rhythmus 21 is considered to be the first abstract film in the experimental tradition. The Webdriver Torso YouTube channel is composed of hundreds of thousands of machine-generated test patterns designed to check frequency signals on YouTube. This article discusses geometric abstraction vis-à-vis new vision, conceptual art and algorithmic art. It argues that the Webdriver Torso is an artistic marvel indicative of a form we call mathematical abstraction, which is art performed by computers and, quite possibly, for computers.

This paper aims to discuss algorithmic art (also known as computer-generated or generative art) in a comparative perspective with artistic practices generated by means of non-computer-based methods. More precisely, it seeks to trace art-historical relationships between algorithmic art and certain examples from modern art movements. The artist whose works are chosen as the starting point for this investigation is the German artist Manfred Mohr. The investigation will firstly attempt to identify key features of algorithmic art based on its formal visual properties as well as production techniques involved. In the second step, it will discuss these observed characteristics in a comparative perspective with historical precedents and contemporary practices from non-computer art.  By comparing aesthetic principles and techniques used by selected artists, the paper seeks to contribute towards a growing awareness that it is necessary to consider algorithmic art within the broader historical context of its relationships with non-digital art forms.

This paper discusses the creative potential of the transmutability of digital data, while focusing on the exploration of textual material. It begins by addressing the conceptual and creative possibilities associated to the topic, and then discusses artifacts that imply or express transmutability as an artistic concept and method. To this end, we resort to a framework for the description and analysis of these artifacts, focusing on their conceptual dimension, on their mechanics and on the elements of their experience. In particular, we address the concepts they approach through the use of data in textual formats as source information or content, we consider the processes for its manipulation, and describe the resulting sensory manifestations while emphasizing their dynamics and variability. In this manner, this study seeks to highlight how transmutability becomes relevant as an artistic argument, by proposing aesthetic experiences that explore the ubiquity and heterogeneity of data in our contemporary world, as it becomes available in text formats.

Media professionals – such as news editors, image researchers, and documentary filmmakers - increasingly rely on online access to digital content within audiovisual archives to create narratives. Retrieving audiovisual sources therefore requires an in-depth knowledge of how to find sources digitally. These storytelling practices intertwine search technologies with the user’s ideas and production cultures. This paper presents qualitative research insights into how media professionals search in digital archives to create (trans)medial narratives, and uses the notion of creative retrieval to unravel the dynamics of audiovisual narrative production. Creative retrieval combines ideas about the effects of media convergence on media content, theories about serendipitous information retrieval, and studies of creativity to argue that retrieval practices of media professionals who create audiovisual narratives are governed by organizational, technological and content affordances and constraints. The paper furthermore exemplifies the first stage of an ongoing research project in which a user-centered design approach guides open source self-learning search algorithm development to support creative retrieval.

This paper looks back at historical precedents for how computational systems and ideas have been visualized as a means of access to and engagement with a broader audience, and to develop a new more tangible language to address abstraction. These precedents share a subversive ground in using a visual language to provoke new ways of engaging with about complex ideas. Two new approaches to visualizing algorithmic systems are proposed for the emerging context of algorithmic ethics in society, looking at prototypical algorithms in computer vision and machine learning systems, to think through the meaning created by algorithmic structure and process. The aim is to use visual design to provoke new kinds of thinking and criticality that can offer opportunities to address algorithms in their increasingly more politicized role today. These new approaches are developed from an arts research perspective to support critical thinking and arts knowledge through creative coding and interactive design.

In the past few years deep-learning AI neural networks have achieved major milestones in artistic image analysis and generation, producing what some refer to as ‘art.’ We reflect critically on some of the artistic shortcomings of a few projects that occupied the spotlight in recent years. We introduce the term ‘Zombie Art’ to describe the generation of new images of dead masters, as well as ‘The AI Reproducibility Test.’ We designate the problems inherent in AI and in its application to art history. In conclusion, we propose new directions for both AI-generated art and art history, in the light of these new powerful AI technologies of artistic image analysis and generation.

This article draws a perceptual approach to audio-visual mapping. Clearly perceivable cause and effect relationships can be problematic if one desires the audience to experience the music. Indeed perception would bias those sonic qualities that fit previous concepts of causation, subordinating other sonic qualities, which may form the relations between the sounds themselves. The question is, how can an audio-visual mapping produce a sense of causation, and simultaneously confound the actual cause-effect relationships. We call this a fungible audio-visual mapping. Our aim here is to glean its constitution and aspect. We will report a study, which draws upon methods from experimental psychology to inform audio-visual instrument design and composition. The participants are shown several audio-visual mapping prototypes, after which we pose quantitative and qualitative questions regarding their sense of causation, and their sense of understanding the cause-effect relationships. The study shows that a fungible mapping requires both synchronized and seemingly non-related components – sufficient complexity to be confusing. As the specific cause-effect concepts remain inconclusive, the sense of causation embraces the whole.

This article presents a series of works called Machinic Trajectories, consisting of domestic devices appropriated as mechanical drawing machines. These are contextualized within the post-digital discourse, which integrates messy analog conditions into the digital realm. The role of eliciting and examining glitches for investigating a technology is pointed out. Glitches are defined as short-lived, unpremeditated aesthetic results of a failure; they are mostly known as digital phenomena, but I argue that the concept is equally applicable to the output of mechanical machines. Three drawing machines will be presented: The Opener, The Mixer and The Ventilator. In analyzing their drawings, emergent patterns consisting of unpremeditated visual artifacts will be identified and connected to irregularities of the specific technologies. Several other artists who work with mechanical and robotic drawing machines are introduced, to situate the presented works and reflections in a larger context of practice and to investigate how glitch concepts are applicable to such mechanical systems.

We present a new media work, MediaScape, which is an initial foray into a fully interdisciplinary metacreativity. This paper defines metacreation, and we present examples of metacreative art within the fields of music, sound art, the history of generative narrative, and discuss the potential of the “open-documentary” as an immediate goal of metacreative video. Lastly, we describe MediaScape in detail, and present some future directions.