RCAAP Repository

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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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.