RCAAP Repository

Departing from the concept of an Internet of Things (IoT) as a means to give voice to non-human ‘things’, the project Wildthings.io seeks to develop experimental prototypes for grassroots, community-run digital networks, and DIY electronic devices as artistic interventions. This article discusses the iterative design processes that concluded in the IoT artwork Papawai Transmissions, which imagines novel ways of understanding and (re-) connecting with disconnected streams, their communities and their ecosystems in urban Aotearoa/New Zealand, focussing particularly on slowness as a key method for designing in a more-than-human context, alongside openness and seamfulness.

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The dawn of computer data visualization launched a permanent challenge: the representation of objects with computers. Nowadays we expect to see and experience not just a mere representation of objects but realistic objects created by computers. This work is an ongoing experiment to demonstrate how we sought to represent artistic objects, rebuild and enhance their visual appearance, and reconstruct missing physical parts using of Computer Graphic tools. This multidisciplinary effort enables us to experience virtual artistic objects and makes them available for uncontrolled and unprepared 3d environments like classrooms, museums, or wherever we intend to easily share digital contents.

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This paper analyses the experience of the networked off-line improvisation ‘Listening and Remembering’, a performance for four commuters using voices and sounds from the Mexico City and Paris metros. It addresses the question: how can an act of collective remembering, inspired by listening to metro soundscapes, lead to the creation of networked voice-and sound-based narratives about the urban commuting experience? The networked experience is seen here from the structural perspective (telematic setting), the sonic underground context, the ethnographic process that led to the performance, the narratives that are created in the electro-acoustic setting, the shared acoustic environments that those creations suggest, and the technical features and participants’ responses that pre- vent or facilitate interaction. Emphasis is placed on the participants’ status as non-performers, and on their familiarity with the sonic environment, as a context that allows the participation of non-musicians in the making of music through telematically shared interfaces, using soundscape and real-time voice. Participants re-enact their routine experience through a dialogical relationship with the sounds, the other participants, themselves, and the experience of sharing: a collective memory.

This study investigates the field of higher education and expertise development for learning and performing the double bass. The aim is to draw a picture of how the double bass is currently learned and performed by the learning student, the supervising professor and the performer working in a symphony orchestra, to find out whether if there were any significant differences between the three groups in their approaches to practice and performance. Results indicated that the achievement of expertise on the double bass is multifaceted and implies the development of multiple tasks and skills which soon have to be fostered and experienced in the field of learning and performing. Significant differences between the three groups were detected in the area of demography, experiences, knowledge, and their approaches to practice. Recommendations and implications for further investigation indicate that a wider perspective of learning, practice, self-evaluation in combination of the usage of technology for practice support and feedback should be taken into account for enhancing performance ability for the double bass.

The present article presents a doctoral investigation. It mainly focuses on an action research whose problematic is based on the search for didactic-pedagogical paths which contribute to intercultural openness and change within schools allowing for better social integration. We have chosen the trilogy music, arts education and interculturality to address the central problematics of this research. Therefore an Intercultural Musical Program was conceived, implemented and assessed in three Portuguese Elementary/Preparatory schools. The main leading forces guiding this Program are attached to four areas, which constitute the theoretical/conceptual frame of this research: Artistic education as a priority in education; • Intercultural education as a response to a growing cultural diversity; The role of music as an harnessing methodology for intercultural communication; Arts Programs as globalising impulses for human development and the preservation of cultural heritage. The empirical work rests on a methodology of qualitative analysis based on Renald Legendre’s (1993, 2005) model of Pedagogical Relationship (PR), combined with a strong influence of Visual Anthropology. The attained results are indicators of the high relevance and participation, as well as of the transforming impact of this action research, as a facilitator of intercultural communication and education among communities.

To polarize and, coincidently, intersect two different concepts, in terms of a distinction/analogy between “piano interpretation schools” and “critical models” is the aim of this paper. The former, with its prior connotations of both empiricism and dogmatism and not directly shaped by aesthetic criteria or interpretational ideals, depends mainly on the aural and oral tradition as well the teacher-student legacy; the latter employs ideally the generic criteria of interpretativeness, which can be measured in accordance to an aesthetic formula and can include features such as non-obviousness, inferentially, lack of consensus, concern with meaning or significance, concern with structure or design, etc. The relative autonomy of the former is a challenge to the latter, which embraces the range of perspectives available in the horizon of the history of ideas about music and interpretation. The effort of recognizing models of criticism within musical interpretation creates the vehicle for new understandings of the nature and the historical development of Western classical piano performance, promoting also the production of quality critical argument and the communication of key performance tendencies and styles.

This article is about the Portuguese tilemaking of the former Monastery of Santa Marta de Jesus, currently Hospital of Santa Marta, still in situ. The main goal is the study of the patterned tiles from the 17th century, exploring the documentation as well as the ideas and solutions invented by the tile-layers that applied the tiles on the walls. Also, the authors aim to introduce the new information system for the Portuguese azulejos’ inventory, named Az Infinitum - Azulejo Indexation and Reference System, available online.

Artists’ practices are varied. Two extremes include the need for complete solitude when working and others who seek social environments such as collaborations in communal studio settings. In addition to these real life studio practices new technologies and social media have made it possible for artists to use virtual studio practices in the process of developing creative work. Working virtually offers a range of interesting benefits for creative practice. This article explores the author’s recent experiences in virtual studio practices in light of the literature on this topic and considers the implications for creativity. It highlights five specific benefits in using virtual studio practices and considers possible limitations of working in such a manner. In exploring virtual studio practices and arguing the case for such ways of working, this article contributes to research and understandings about creative practice by discussing one artist’s reflective experience of using virtual studio practices.

In video games the player’s actions shape the narrative of their personal experience, molding what otherwise would be a linear course. This emergent narrative is in a state of constant transformation, dependent on how the player influences it. This paper explores how the players traverse ergodic media such as video games and how narrative emerges from the interactions between them and the system. In a previous text we have proposed three types of traversal in video games (Cardoso & Carvalhais, 2013): 1) that in which the player has the ability to choose between mutually exclusive paths; 2) that in which the player has the ability to expand the narrative; and 3) that in which the traversal is determined by the disposition of the other actors in the game world towards the player and each other. This paper intends to further contribute by adding another one: 4) a type of traversal that is rooted in the exploitation of any flaws and glitches in the system, allowing the player to traverse the game through an overlooked side of the algorithm, journeying through a world of unpredictable behaviours and events, that may ultimately break the game altogether.

This essay establishes a parallelism between the ‘Clavilux’, a silent colour-organ from Thomas Wilfred in the —beginning of the 20th century, and ‘Ufabulum’, an audiovisual live performance from the artist Squarepusher in the year 2012. It presents an overview of the analogies and synergies between sound and image in the recent history of music and visual arts, and connects both artists with almost one hundred years of audiovisual instruments, techniques and sound-image analogies, that despite the technical and creative evolutions, maintain the same concepts and dreams over time in the quest for high-sensory experiences and synaesthetic states.

Photographs, or images as the final result of a process, merely mark out the moment when the eye is helplessly limited to what it sees. Thus, what escapes the eye in the physical sense, i.e. what the eye will never see, is what occurs before the product- image, within the act itself. The latent image, the desire-image, unfolds throughout the duration of the photographic act. When the picture is ‘taken’, then the desire subsides until the next desire for another image arises. Based on the photographic experiment by Jerry Chan, member of a group of blind people, this article aims at rethinking the photographic act as the real- life experience of an impression process, leading the blind apprentice photographer to experience sightedness within his very flesh.

This paper highlights the art object nature as a theoretical anchor regarding contemporary virtual art, as well as traditional art practices, like painting. The analysis takes as a starting point the new immaterial status of the artistic object in the computer age. Despite the widespread prevalence in the analysis, our goal is to detach some key features as: meaning, intentionality and virtualization. These subjects prove to be related to each other and most of all, the link between intentionality and virtualization, brings forward the inconclusive nature of the art object and the decisive role of the spectator in the outcome of the creative process. Therefore, we acknowledge that the virtual fosters creativity, although remarking the lack of substance in some expressions of new media art. So, a final statement reassesses the importance of traditional practices, but now with the awareness of new media cultural logic, and its contribution to creation.

The orthodox view of the computer as a medium or medium of media (ie. “new media”) is perfectly justified in colloquial discussions, but is hardly evident as an objective fact. This does not imply that computers are employed in the making of art, rather we are investigating a means of initiating the occurrence of an artistic experience for the audience, with whatever tools are convenient, in this case computers. We leverage the feature that logical syllogisms can be articulated such as to create systems that act as catalysts for Constructivist learning to take place within the individual minds of audience members. These concrete, but unobservable synaptic adjustments are subsequently displayed via unpredicted idiosyncratic behaviours. In short, whether or not a computer can choreograph a dance, we describe how automated machines can coerce humans to dance. In doing so, we uncover mysteries as to the ubiquity and influence of art on our species.

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This study aims to discuss the work Duet for one Pianist (1989) by the French composer Jean-Claude Risset (b. 13 March 1938) by analyzing the challenges of the music performance of this Computer-Aided Composition work Disklavier and implies Human-Computer Interaction performance. Extremely honored to perform the revised version of the 8 Sketches for One Pianist and Disklavier within a research project of CITAR and a new Sketch Reflections (2012) by Jean-Claude Risset dedicated to me in a World premiere in the closing ceremony of Black&White 2012 Film Festival promoted by the Catholic University of Portugal. Several issues on the performance of this work are analysed as a case-study, from the point of view of the performer, particularly the components of expressive performance in a real-time interaction between performer and computer. These components can work as analysis criteria of a piano interpretation, in here, of a pianist and Disklavier interpretation. 

Computational technologies have significantly expanded the horizons of aesthetic creation; nonetheless, their wider ontological status as tools remains poorly understood. This limitation hinders our ability to assess their true impact on aesthetic practices and limits our means to establish the relationship between computer generated artefacts and previous forms of ‘media’. This paper argues that understanding and categorising the things computational technologies are able to do as aesthetic tools also requires understanding what type of tools they are. Following recent insights from philosophy of information and post-phenomenology, this paper begins by showing computational technologies are no ordinary mediators, but truly ‘multi-stable’ appliances which are leading us to reformulate our very notions of reality and self-understanding. While delivering a fully-fledged ontological model falls outside of its scope, this paper nonetheless suggests that within aesthetic contexts, computational devices may be initially described as information modelling appliances. This characterisation offers an alternative to their increasingly less adequate portrayal as ‘media’.

How do we define, discuss or assess aesthetics within a contemporary philosophical framework? The indefiniteness that accompanies attempts to formalize a definition of the aesthetic is a primary focus of this paper. This lack of a definition has occupied philosophers for hundreds of years in attempts to delineate the boundaries of an elusively formless concept. This formlessness speaks to the incredibly evasive character of such a pervasive feature recognized in both natural and artificial systems, agents and artefacts. With the rapid growth of artificially intelligent systems and an astounding diversity in computational creativity, in what ways may we approach aesthetics? How is the aesthetic recognized, determined and produced? This paper seeks to critically engage issues of non-human agency, inter-object relations, and aesthetic theory in relation to computational entities and autonomous systems. The ability of these systems to operate outside of human cognitive limitations including thought patterns and constructions which may preclude alternative aesthetic outcomes, afford them in some ways limitless potential in relation to aesthetics. The designation of the accidental or provisional is utilized as an alternative approach to the production and assessment of aesthetic occurrences of the non-human.