Short Big Drama highlights the theatricality of the artist’s practice. This comprehensive exhibition presents a wide selection of existing works together with specially commissioned new pieces. The spotlight falls on three types of works — monumental wall paintings, colorful Pixel Box installations and interactive Drawing Machines.

In the installation of the works, contradiction takes center-stage. Playing with the nature of drama — be this epic or mundane, short or big, or perhaps all of these at once — the project adapts exhibition space to draw out the tensions and attractions between the distinct impulses that animate Bulloch’s practice. For Witte de With, the artist interprets and manipulates earlier, potentially clashing installations into a seemingly harmonious whole, revealing a particular beauty which lies at the heart of complexity.

Bulloch’s approach is interdisciplinary, incorporating references from a wide array of sources, amongst them modern history, vanguard film, punk and electronic music. In her wall paintings, specific references to aesthetic, political or social developments are deconstructed and graphically re-assembled. Through this process of détournement, the artist questions the informational status of an artwork, as well as the possibility of narrating history. Bulloch’s Drawing Machines are interactive pieces, triggered or altered by the movements of visitors. In this way, her works explore the dialectic between technology and labor, making us conscious of our place, and that of others, within the gallery space. With her Pixel Boxes, Bulloch ‘programs’ our experience of art by encoding her signature modular light and sound installations with data from a vast array of cultural sources. Though these sources and the workings behind the installations remain invisible, a viewer may sense the imposition of a predefined code, even if unconsciously.

The manipulation of codes and a sense of control pervade Bulloch’s artistic practice. Whether that code is music- or text-based, the artist plays with and orchestrates our perception and experience of art. In proposing that this experience can be ’subliminal’ her work aims to stage that which is beyond our grasp.

Curated by Amira Gad & Nicolaus Schafhausen.

Angela Bulloch (b. 1966, Canada) is a Berlin-based sculptor, installation and sound artist. She is recognized as one of the Young British Artists and was included in the 1988 Freeze Exhibition. In 1997, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Information, Manifesto, Rules and Other Leaks…, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2011); Discrete Manifold Whatsoever, Simon Lee Gallery, London; Redux, Esther Schipper, Berlin (both 2010); and The space that time forgot, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus & Kunstbau, Munich (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Art Parcours, Art Basel 41, Münster Cathedral, Basel; A Roll Of The Dice, Cristina Guerra, Lisbon; Drawing Time, Galeries Poirels, Frac Lorraine, Metz; High ideals and crazy dreams, Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg; and Open light in private spaces, Biennale for international Light Art, Unna (all 2010); Universal Code, The Power Plant, Toronto; and Yellow and Green, MMK Frankfurt, Frankfurt (both 2009). Bulloch teaches at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

PUBLICATION
Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch
ISBN: 978-94-91435-00-3

To accompany the exhibition, Witte de With Publishers will release Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch in March 2012. In addition to visual documentation of the exhibition, this publication will include critical texts by Nav Haq and John Miller as well as a script by Christine Lang and Christoph Dreher. It will also feature a special selection from Angela Bulloch’s Rules series under the title of “Rules of this Century.”

Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch is the 10th and final publication of Witte de With Publishers’ Source Book series, monographic publications providing an in-depth look into one artist’s practice.

Visit Witte de With’s online shop: www.wdw.nl/shop

Supported by: Goethe-Institut Niederlande, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Den Haag, and The Canada Council for the Arts.

This paper reflects on the creation and perception of an interactive spatial ChoreoSonic1 performance environment. The term ‘Transonic Perception’ is introduced to describe the intimate bodily experience of the dancer who creates the 3D spatial sonic environment within the technologically enhanced environment. I will discuss conceptual issues that outline a synchronicity between the spatial elements of dance movement and 3D spatial sound perception that can be used artistically in the creative process. The discussion focuses specifically on the human perception of the visual, tactical and auditory space in the digitally enhanced performance environment.

The Italian artist Sonia Cillari, honourable mention in VIDA 13.0, will share with participants her exploration of sensorial and perception mechanisms in immersed environments and the consciousness, perception and identity-related patterns arising from them.

The workshop is structured along three main lines: physical and phenomenological reality, the body as an interface (how do we experience space?) and the physical phenomena of the radiating body. The event is also conceived as an open debate during which attendees may propose new perceptive strategies and discuss the specific subjects proposed.

There is a maximum of 15 places available. All those interested in attending should bring a digital camera and a laptop or tablet PC with the means necessary to transfer data. Participants may also bring electronic and technological material (sensors, coils, motors, etc.) which they might like to share.
In order to spread this activity, the workshop will be filmed and the images may be issued in different media.

In collaboration with Matadero Madrid.

Pulse by Markus Kison is a real time visualization of emotional expressions from blogs.

Entries are compared to a list of emotions, which refers to Robert Plutchik’s seminal book Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion published in 1980. Plutchik describes eight basic human emotions in his book: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. He developed a diagram in which these eight emotions, together with their weakened and amplified counterparts, form a three dimensional cone, consisting of 24 areas. The cone is the basic form of pulse, which can enlarge in the 24 directions of the different emotions. Each time an emotion tag, or a synonym of it, is found in a recent blog entry, the shape-shifting object transforms itself in such a way that the new volume represents a piece of the overall current emotional condition of surfers on the Internet. [via Network Research]

Presented outdoors during Sherbrooke’s Espace [IM] Média festival, Dérive is a networked interactive installation by François Quévillon that invites the public to explore 3D models of urban spaces that are transformed according to environmental data collected in real time on the Web.

This first version of the installation presents 3D point clouds of Orleans (France), New York (USA), Sherbrooke and Montreal (Quebec, Canada) that were realized by the use of photogrammetry and geomatic data. A computer vision interface allows the public to interact with virtual spaces which reflect meteorological and astronomical phenomena taking place in these cities at the time of the user’s experience. By connecting the actual and the virtual, Dérive inquires the phenomenology of mixed realities and probes into the changing nature of our perception and our representation of the world.

noemaflux describes an act of shifting perception. In this work it is centered on the experience of an augmented reality to enable new experiences of urban space and different ways of seeing the city. This experience is constructed via a network of relationships that connect AR markers, urban space, generative writing systems and abstract virtual spaces.

Players use mobile devices explore streets and laneways and find nine signs integrated into the urban environment. They act both as navigational signage in urban space and as gateways into the artificial world. The signs have dual meaning as both elements of an invented language (that of an artificial world) and a machine-readable language (as AR markers). Players discover worlds through these markers and being in these worlds triggers the growth of abstract writing systems. As they move about the city they carry digital seeds that pollinate each site with glyphs from the previous site creating a crossmedia ecology connecting people, urban spaces, signs and digital systems.

In noemaflux, familiar urban spaces are reinvented and inscribed with new meaning via a mixed reality. Firstly, established technologies of augmented reality such as AR markers are given a new aesthetic via their integration into sculpture, street signage and banners. Secondly, the city is reinvented through the creation of a new space in which streets and laneways overlap with abstract virtual worlds. Via these dual processes of interaction players become interconnected with the artificial world of the work and the urban landscape in which it is situated.

This project was originally developed as part of the Artist in Residence program at IAMAS in Ogaki, Japan in 2010.

This panel, then, seeks to push this area fur­ther, par­tic­u­larly em­pha­siz­ing the role of media and me­di­al­iza­tion: Brian Mas­sumi’s and Mark Hansen’s work, for ex­am­ple, de­spite its sig­nif­i­cance, con­tin­ues to em­ploy an un­dif­fer­en­ti­ated no­tion of “em­bod­i­ment“ to de­scribe in­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion.

In­ter­art Stud­ies has es­tab­lished it­self as a field wherein schol­ars from a va­ri­ety of dis­ci­plines an­a­lyze the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween dif­fer­ent art forms based on his­tor­i­cally di­ver­gent con­cepts of mono- and in­ter­me­di­al­ity. In­ter­me­di­al­ity, in turn, de­notes in­ter­re­lated strate­gies of dif­fer­ent media de­signs that gen­er­ate new forms of pre­sen­ta­tion and re­cep­tion modes – modes that amount to more than just an ac­cu­mu­la­tion of the media in­volved. To cite one ex­am­ple: the in­te­gra­tion of film/video in some the­atre per­for­mances today merges 3-D-(the stage) and 2-D-(the screen) tech­nolo­gies. This in­ter­re­la­tion not only changes the stage de­sign, but also af­fects the ac­tors’ per­for­mances as they in­ter­act with each other while main­tain­ing vis­i­bil­ity in front of the screen. This si­mul­tane­ity de­mands in­creased at­ten­tion to both nat­ural (the co-ac­tors) and tech­ni­cal media (film/video) – and, by de­fault, the same ap­plies to the re­cep­tion modes of the au­di­ence.

Con­se­quently, the no­tion of in­ter­me­di­al­ity com­prises media pre­sen­ta­tion strate­gies and in­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion modes. This new phe­nom­e­non or trend is, as of yet, barely ac­counted for in In­ter­art Stud­ies, ex­cept­ing a few no­table mod­els such as Car­o­line A. Jones’s con­cept of “sen­so­rium” that re­lates sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion to cul­tural me­di­al­iza­tion. In­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion, nonethe­less, is cur­rently emerg­ing as a promi­nent area in var­i­ous dis­ci­plines, show­cas­ing new phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal ap­proaches.

This panel, then, seeks to push this area fur­ther, par­tic­u­larly em­pha­siz­ing the role of media and me­di­al­iza­tion: Brian Mas­sumi’s and Mark Hansen’s work, for ex­am­ple, de­spite its sig­nif­i­cance, con­tin­ues to em­ploy an un­dif­fer­en­ti­ated no­tion of “em­bod­i­ment“ to de­scribe in­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion. As a re­sult, they ig­nore the dif­fer­ences of sen­so­r­ial data, which an­chor sense per­cep­tions in di­verse cul­tural con­texts. Ad­di­tion­ally, the me­di­ated and hence cul­tur­ally pre-formed char­ac­ter of sen­sual per­cep­tion is mostly dis­re­garded in favour of a con­cept that em­braces a dif­fuse, im­me­di­ate sens­ing process that seems to be ‘pre-me­dial’ or ‘ex­tra-me­dial’. At its core, and to high­light the cul­tural dif­fer­ences of sen­so­r­ial data, this panel seeks to ad­dress cur­rent re­search un­der­taken by the cog­ni­tive sci­ences to em­pha­size the in­ter­sec­tions of in­ter­art and in­ter­sen­so­rium as processes of per­cep­tion that are in­ter­locked with cul­tural for­ma­tions – a tri­an­gu­lar con­t­a­m­i­na­tion or rec­i­p­ro­cal process much in need of fur­ther ques­tion­ing and ex­am­i­na­tion.

Paper Ab­stracts

Un­medi­ated Ex­pe­ri­ence? Re-Me­di­at­ing Phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal Ap­proaches
by Dr. Chris­tiane Heibach

Phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal ap­proaches have be­come very promi­nent within the last few years. One rea­son for that might be that mul­ti­me­dia art de­mands mul­ti­sen­sory modes of per­cep­tion that chal­lenge the tra­di­tional epis­te­mo­log­i­cal mod­els that focus on vi­sual per­cep­tion and inner imag­i­na­tive processes. They rely on dis­tant per­cep­tion and ne­glect the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween sen­sory data and their in­di­vid­ual in­ter­pre­ta­tion in the per­ciever’s mind. Fur­ther­more per­cep­tion is the re­sult of the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween mul­ti­sen­sory per­cep­tion and emo­tional, sub- and pre­con­scious processes – and this is em­pha­sized by some con­tem­po­rary phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal ap­proaches. But their con­cepts mostly un­der­stand phys­i­cal/sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ence as im­me­di­ate, that means: un­medi­ated. From a me­diathe­o­ret­i­cal point of view un­medi­ated ex­pe­ri­ence doesn’t exist as we only per­ceive through media – be it the human body or the air which trans­ports sound waves and light or the tech­ni­cal media we use for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­for­ma­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion. The ques­tion my pre­sen­ta­tion will ad­dress is the fol­low­ing: How can mul­ti­sen­sory and bod­ily ex­pe­ri­ence be com­bined with con­cepts of media with­out falling back into the clas­si­cal epis­te­mo­log­i­cal sub­ject-ob­ject di­vi­sion? And what kind of per­cep­tion model is needed to be able to ex­plain the com­plex­ity of our daily mul­ti­me­dia en­vi­ron­ment?

In­ter­me­dia and the Aware­ness of Synes­the­sia
by Dr. Cre­tien van Campen

Synes­the­sia has re­ceived much at­ten­tion in sci­ence, art and in par­tic­u­lar in the over­lap­ping fields of dig­i­tal art and in­ter­me­dia in the last decades. Artists and sci­en­tists in these fields share a com­mon in­ter­est in human per­cep­tion. In the arts, synes­the­sia refers to a range of phe­nom­ena of si­mul­ta­ne­ous per­cep­tion of two or more stim­uli as one gestalt ex­pe­ri­ence. In neu­ro­science, synes­the­sia is more strictly de­fined as the elic­i­ta­tion of per­cep­tual ex­pe­ri­ences in the ab­sence of the nor­mal sen­sory stim­u­la­tion.

About one in twenty-three per­sons has a type of ‘neu­ro­log­i­cal’ synes­the­sia. Over 60 types have been re­ported, and peo­ple dif­fer in in­ten­sity of the ex­pe­ri­ence. The most com­mon type of synes­the­sia is col­ored week­days, while the type of per­ceiv­ing col­ored let­ters and num­bers is most stud­ied by sci­en­tists, and the type of col­ored sound and music is most ex­plored by artists.

The neu­ro­sci­en­tific de­f­i­n­i­tion of synes­the­sia lim­its the num­ber of so-called ‘synes­thetes’ to 4% in the pop­u­la­tion. This num­ber con­trasts with the large amount of peo­ple who are in­ter­ested in art forms that pre­sent synes­thetic ex­pe­ri­ences to the pub­lic.

This raises ques­tions like: is synes­the­sia ge­net­i­cally fixed at birth? Or is there a range of types of synes­thetic per­cep­tions in which a ge­net­i­cal dis­po­si­tion for synes­the­sia can be de­vel­oped? How wide is that range? How do bi­o­log­i­cal, so­cial and cul­tural fac­tors in­ter­act in this process? How do peo­ple de­velop dif­fer­ent synes­thetic sen­si­bil­i­ties? Slightly dif­fer­ent from the cur­rent neu­ro­sci­en­tific view on ‘neu­ro­log­i­cal synes­the­sia’, I will pro­pose a view on synes­the­sia that also in­cludes so­cial and cul­tural in­ter­ac­tions, which I as­sume will ac­count bet­ter for in­di­vid­ual dif­fer­ences in the aware­ness of synes­the­sia.

The Artist as Sen­sory Ma­chine in the Post Re­al­ity
by Ran­dall Packer

In what I have come to refer to as the post re­al­ity, we have be­come a so­ci­ety of “su­per-par­tic­i­pants” – ap­pro­pri­at­ing, am­pli­fy­ing and redi­rect­ing in­for­ma­tion via the so­cial media. In the post re­al­ity, the su­per-par­tic­i­pant feeds on user feed­back, in which every­thing they do, think, and say is cap­tured and processed and remixed and re-broad­cast – their every sen­sory im­pulse is con­nected and re-con­nected to the un­blink­ing eye of the elec­tronic media. As a re­sult, I have con­cluded it is im­per­a­tive in the cur­rent epoch that the artist must now find new tech­niques and method­olo­gies to more fully em­brace mul­ti­me­dia and its per­va­sive­ness or else be­come in­ef­fec­tual as an artist. This ne­ces­sity is akin to László Mo­holy-Nagy’s ur­gent view of the gesamtkunst­werk in the early 20th cen­tury when he de­clared: “What we need is not the gesamtkunst­werk along­side and sep­a­rate from which life flows by, but a syn­the­sis of all the vital im­pulses spon­ta­neously form­ing it­self into the all em­brac­ing gesamtwerk (life) which abol­ishes all iso­la­tion, in which all in­di­vid­ual ac­com­plish­ments pro­ceed from a bi­o­log­i­cal ne­ces­sity and cul­mi­nate in a uni­ver­sal ne­ces­sity.” There is now the ne­ces­sity for a cur­rent day gesamtkunst­werk, or gesamt­daten­werk as Roy As­cott has called it, in which the artist moves be­yond ab­strac­tion, be­yond rep­re­sen­ta­tion, be­yond the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief: the artist be­comes, in ef­fect, fully en­gaged as a sen­sory ma­chine. To demon­strate this idea and its im­pli­ca­tion, I will or­ga­nize and pre­sent a multi-sen­sory read­ing – a rhyth­mi­cal, vi­sual, tex­tual, ges­tural read­ing – that re­flects on cur­rent artis­tic thought con­cern­ing the artist’s role (and re­spon­si­bil­ity) in re­spond­ing to and com­ment­ing on the trans­for­ma­tive ef­fects of the post real con­di­tion.

Sen­so­r­ial Transcod­ing. Hy­per­modal Con­fig­u­ra­tions of Per­cep­tion and Ex­pres­sion in Elec­tronic Art
by Bir­git Mers­mann

The novel trans­me­dial as me­dia-trans­gress­ing qual­ity of elec­tronic in­ter­art forms is rec­i­p­ro­cally re­lated to their grow­ing mul­ti­modal po­tency. As Brian Mas­sumi has high­lighted when re­flect­ing on the sit­u­a­tion of media in cri­sis, “the dig­i­tal isn’t a medium. (…) Dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy is an ex­pand­ing net­work of con­nec­tive and fu­sional po­ten­tial. You can take an input in any sense modal­ity, and trans­late or trans­duce it into an­other.” (Mas­sumi 2008) Draw­ing upon this trans­me­dia ap­proach, the paper stud­ies inter/ac­tions of sen­so­r­ial transcod­ing as fun­da­men­tal con­di­tion of dig­i­tal­ity.

On the basis of con­tem­po­rary elec­tronic art by artists from dif­fer­ent cul­tural back­grounds (among them Golan Levin, Hung Keung, Kim Kichul), it will in­ves­ti­gate the si­mul­ta­ne­ous trans­la­tions and mu­tual tran­si­tions be­tween sen­sory per­cep­tions and ex­pres­sions on dif­fer­ent modal com­plex­ity lev­els such as speak­ing and writ­ing, lis­ten­ing and read­ing, sound­ing and hear­ing, vi­su­al­iz­ing and view­ing, touch­ing and sens­ing. The pur­pose of this sen­so­r­ial transcod­ing analy­sis is three­fold: 1. to pon­der how a new the­ory of dig­i­tal synaes­thet­ics can be built on the cat­e­gory and con­cept of hy­per­modal­ity, 2. to ex­plore the con­nec­tiv­ity mode be­tween dig­i­tal ab­strac­tion and dig­i­tal em­bod­i­ment, and 3. to dis­cern the uni­ver­sal and cul­ture-de­ter­mined com­po­nents of the cod­i­fi­ca­tion of (multi)sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ence.

Beauty and the brain
by Prof. Semir Zeki

Sub­jec­tive ex­pe­ri­ences, which have not been amend­able to ex­per­i­men­tal mea­sure­ments in the past can now be mea­sured in terms of brain ac­tiv­ity and re­lated to the in­ten­sity of the de­clared ex­pe­ri­ences. This in­flu­ences a new chap­ter in the study of the brain and its ac­tiv­ity in re­la­tion to ex­pe­ri­ences such as love, hate, de­sire and beauty in ad­di­tion to the study of per­cep­tion, which is it­self a sub­jec­tive ex­pe­ri­ence

The Avant-Gardes’ Every­day Sen­so­rium: On Tast­ing and Smelling Mod­ernism
by Anke Fin­ger

This paper adds to an in­creas­ing trend rein­ves­ti­gat­ing mod­ernism on the basis of the ‘or­di­nary’ or the ‘every­day’. How­ever, based on the schol­ar­ship of Madalina Di­a­conu, Yuriko Saito, Car­o­line Jones, Ce­cilia Novero, John Roberts, and oth­ers, the pur­pose here, ex­plic­itly, is to un­cover an every­day ais­thetic within avant-garde move­ments and to high­light and ex­am­ine those senses, those modes and media of per­cep­tion that, in a long aes­thetic and philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion, have been mar­gin­al­ized: the senses of taste and smell. While a West­ern ma­te­r­ial cul­tural stud­ies focus de­tected many in­spir­ing con­nec­tions be­tween mod­ernism and con­sump­tion, cor­re­spond­ing analy­ses of avant-garde move­ments and their prod­ucts have been bur­dened by an overem­pha­sis on the vi­sual and the au­di­tory. Over time, they also hardly ques­tioned the method­olog­i­cal an­gles by which a cer­tain epis­te­mo­log­i­cal tra­di­tion of avant-garde schol­ar­ship has taken place. This paper, in work­ing with se­lect art prod­ucts from Fu­tur­ism (Marinetti’s cook­book), Ex­pres­sion­ism (Claire Goll), Sur­re­al­ism (Guil­laume Apol­li­naire) and a num­ber of lesser known works and artists, em­pha­sizes an in­ter­sen­sory and in­ter­arts ap­proach to the avant-gardes and their media. It will show that the ques­tion of every­day aes­thet­ics in mod­ernism is in­vari­ably in­ter­twined with the cul­tural habits or rup­tures of every­day ais­thet­ics and should in­spire ex­plo­rations into an at­mos­pher­i­cally ori­ented mod­ernism of over­lap­ping life-worlds (Lebenswel­ten) that re­mains to be de­fined.

Bios of the Par­tic­i­pants

Cre­tien van Campen is sci­en­tific re­searcher, au­thor and ed­i­tor in so­cial sci­ence and fine arts. He is af­fli­ated as a se­nior re­searcher at the Nether­lands In­sti­tute for So­cial Re­search and mod­er­a­tor of Synes­thet­ics Nether­lands, the web com­mu­nity of synes­thetes in the Nether­lands. He is ed­i­tor of the Leonardo on­line bib­li­og­ra­phy Synes­the­sia in Art and Sci­ence. His lat­est book is The Hid­den Sense: Synes­the­sia in Art and Sci­ence (MIT Press 2007). He has pub­lished in the fields of the senses, per­cep­tion & art and health, hap­pines & well-be­ing.

Anke Fin­ger is As­so­ci­ate Pro­fes­sor of Ger­man Stud­ies and Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture at the Uni­ver­sity of Con­necti­cut. Her re­search in­ter­ests in­clude Ger­man and Com­par­a­tive Mod­ernism, In­ter­art Stud­ies/Lit­er­a­ture and Other Arts, Avant-Gardes, Aes­thet­ics, Media The­ory and Phi­los­o­phy, In­ter­cul­tur­al­ity and Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture. Re­cent pub­li­ca­tions: The Aes­thet­ics of the Total Art­work: On Bor­ders and Frag­ments (ed., with Danielle Fol­lett, 2011); Das Gesamtkunst­werk der Mod­erne (2006); Vilém Flusser: An In­tro­duc­tion (with Rainer Guldin and Gus­tavo Bernardo (2011)). She is co-ed­i­tor of the on­line-jour­nal “Flusser Stud­ies: Mul­ti­lin­gual Jour­nal on Cul­tural and Media The­ory”.

Chris­tiane Heibach is a re­searcher in aesthtics, media and lit­er­ary stud­ies at at the Karl­sruhe Uni­ver­sity of Arts and De­sign. Since 2009 she is con­duct­ing her own re­search pro­ject “Epis­te­mol­ogy of Mul­ti­me­dia”, funded by the Ger­man Re­search Foun­da­tion and is Re­search Fel­low at the HfG-Re­search In­sti­tute. In 2007 she com­pleted her ha­bil­i­ta­tion on mul­ti­me­dia per­form­ing art forms at the de­part­ment of Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­ary Stud­ies and Media at the Uni­ver­sity of Er­furt where she worked as as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor until 2008. Re­search fields: Me­di­aepis­te­mol­ogy, aes­thet­ics of new media, his­tory and aes­thet­ics of in­ter­me­dia and mul­ti­me­dia art forms, his­tory of aes­thetic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary media and lit­er­ary the­o­ries. Web­sites (Ger­man): www.​christiane-heibach.​de, www.​medienepistemologie.​de; www.​netzaesthetik.​de

Bir­git Mers­mann holds a pro­fes­sor­ship in non-West­ern and Eu­ro­pean Art at the in­ter­na­tional Ja­cobs Uni­ver­sity in Bre­men since 2008. From 2005 to 2007 she was a se­nior re­searcher of the Na­tional Com­pe­tence Cen­tre of Re­search “Iconic Crit­i­cism” at the Uni­ver­sity of Basel, Switzer­land, in­ves­ti­gat­ing “icono­scrip­tures” as hy­brid sym­bolic forms and in­ter-me­dia ex­pres­sions be­tween image and writ­ing. From 1998 to 2002 she taught as DAAD (Ger­man Aca­d­e­mic Ex­change Ser­vice) Vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor at the de­part­ment of Ger­man lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture at Seoul Na­tional Uni­ver­sity in South Korea. Re­search foci in­clude image and media the­ory, vi­su­al­ity and nar­ra­tion, art the­ory and aes­thet­ics, con­tem­po­rary East Asian and West­ern art, global art his­tory, tran­scul­tur­al­ity, trans­la­tion stud­ies, in­ter­re­la­tions be­tween script and image.

Last pub­li­ca­tions: B.M., Alexan­dra Schnei­der (Eds.): Trans­mis­sion Image. Vi­sual Trans­la­tion and Cul­tural Agency, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Schol­ars Pub­lish­ing, 2009; B.M., Thomas Weber (Eds.): Medi­olo­gie als Meth­ode, Berlin: Avi­nus, 2008; Got­tfried Boehm, B.M., Chris­t­ian Spies (Eds.): Movens Bild. Zwis­chen Af­fekt und Ev­i­denz, München: Fink, 2008; B.M., Das Bild als Spur. Trans­gres­sio­nen und An­i­ma­tio­nen, in: Hans Belt­ing (Ed.): Bild­fra­gen. Die Bild­wis­senschaften im Auf­bruch, München, 2007; B.M./Mar­tin Schulz (Ed.): Kul­turen des Bildes, München: Fink, 2006; B.M., Bild­kul­tur­wis­senschaft als Kul­tur­bild­wis­senschaft? Von der Notwendigkeit eines in­ter- und tran­skul­turellen Iconic Turn, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und all­ge­meine Kunst­wissenschaft, Heft 49/1, Ham­burg 2004.

Ran­dall Packer is an in­ter­na­tion­ally ac­claimed mul­ti­me­dia artist and com­poser, cre­at­ing works that have pi­o­neered the in­te­gra­tion of in­ter­ac­tive media, in­stal­la­tion, and live per­for­mance. His work has been per­formed and ex­hib­ited at gal­leries, mu­se­ums, the­aters, and fes­ti­vals through­out the world. In 2001, he founded the US De­part­ment of Art & Tech­nol­ogy in Wash­ing­ton, DC and was ap­pointed as its first Sec­re­tary. Most re­cently, he re­ceived a com­mis­sion to debut his mul­ti­me­dia the­ater work, A Sea­son in Hell, at the ZER01/01SJ Bi­en­nial in San Jose, Cal­i­for­nia. Packer holds an MFA and PhD in music com­po­si­tion and has taught mul­ti­me­dia at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, Mary­land In­sti­tute Col­lege of Art, and Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity in Wash­ing­ton, DC. He is now on the fac­ulty of the Ad­vanced Aca­d­e­mic Pro­grams at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity where he teaches the his­tory, the­ory and prac­tice of mul­ti­me­dia. Packer is a writer and scholar in the field of new media, most no­tably the co-ed­i­tor of Mul­ti­me­dia: From Wag­ner to Vir­tual Re­al­ity. He cur­rently lives and works in Wash­ing­ton, DC.

Pro­fes­sor Semir Zeki is now Pro­fes­sor of Neu­roes­thet­ics at Uni­ver­sity Col­lege Lon­don, after hav­ing served for many years as Pro­fes­sor of Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy there. He pi­o­neered the study of the higher vi­sual areas of the brain, and dis­cov­ered, among other things, its colour and mo­tion cen­tres and hence the func­tional spe­cial­iza­tion within it. More re­cently, he has ex­panded his work to en­quire into the neural cor­re­lates of aes­thetic and artis­tic ex­pe­ri­ence. In ad­di­tion to his pub­lished sci­en­tific pa­pers, he is au­thor of A Vi­sion of the Brain, Inner Vi­sion: an ex­plo­ration of art and the brain, and Splen­dours and Mis­eries of the Brain, and co-au­thor with the late French painter Balthus of La Quête de l’es­sen­tiel and with Lu­dovica Lumer of La bella e la bes­tia: arte e neu­ro­scienza. His artis­tic work is cur­rently on ex­hibit at the Luigi Pecci Mu­seum of Con­tem­po­rary Art in Milan: Bianco su bianco: oltre Male­vich (White on White: Be­yond Male­vich). He is a Fel­low of the Royal So­ci­ety and a For­eign Mem­ber of the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal So­ci­ety. He was awarded the King Faisal In­ter­na­tional Prize in Bi­ol­ogy in 2004 for his work on the brain, and founded the In­sti­tute for Neu­roes­thet­ics in Lon­don and Cal­i­for­nia.

Owing to technical reasons the SMS message exchange works only through Finnish telephone operators and mobile phone numbers with the country code (+358) that are used in Finland. If you want to join the SMS group you should enroll by the 12th of September 2011 at info [at] aloneornot.org. You can also participate directly through Twitter.

“…send kinaesthetic tweets and improvise wherever you may be.” Susan Kozel

The panel dis­cusses cat­e­gories of loca­tive, site-spe­cific media art and their im­pact on un­der­stand­ing the con­text of place. Mo­bile com­put­ing po­ten­tially en­ables var­i­ous forms of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion and has to be con­sid­ered in re­la­tion to con­cepts of em­bod­i­ment, the cre­ation of mean­ing, as well as in­di­vid­ual au­ton­omy and agency.

The pro­posed panel will iden­tify dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of loca­tive, site-spe­cific media art and ex­plore their im­pact on un­der­stand­ing the con­text of place and on our aware­ness of the en­vi­ron­ment. Mo­bile com­put­ing po­ten­tially en­ables var­i­ous forms of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion and has to be con­sid­ered in re­la­tion to con­cepts of em­bod­i­ment, the cre­ation of mean­ing, as well as in­di­vid­ual au­ton­omy and agency. The lat­ter as­pects of mo­bile com­put­ing and loca­tive media con­sid­er­ably af­fect our per­cep­tion and aware­ness of en­vi­ron­ments. Mo­bile de­vices can func­tion as tech­no­log­i­cal ex­ten­sions of em­bod­i­ment, con­nect­ing us to lo­ca­tion-based in­for­ma­tion and en­hanc­ing aware­ness of our en­vi­ron­ment or ‘so­cial body.’

Loca­tive new media art, which uses lo­ca­tions in pub­lic space as a ‘can­vas’ for im­ple­ment­ing art pro­jects, has be­come one of the most ac­tive and fast-grow­ing areas within the larger field of dig­i­tal arts. Cam­era and video phones, smart phones, and mo­bile de­vices with em­bed­ded GPS have be­come new plat­forms for cul­tural pro­duc­tion, pro­vid­ing an in­ter­face through which users can par­tic­i­pate in net­worked pub­lic pro­jects, as well as en­abling the for­ma­tion of ad-hoc com­mu­ni­ties.

The panel will dis­cuss var­i­ous cat­e­gories of loca­tive media art, for ex­am­ple pro­jects that en­hance con­text by al­low­ing par­tic­i­pants to ‘leave a mark’ on their sur­round­ings, sub­mit or re­trieve site-spe­cific in­for­ma­tion, or re­con­fig­ure the map; pro­jects that cre­ate a sys­temic aware­ness of peo­ple’s moods or be­hav­iors by re­flect­ing the pres­ence, move­ments, or ac­tions and re­ac­tions, pro­file, tasks and goals, emo­tions and be­hav­ior of peo­ple in their en­vi­ron­ment. Also dis­cussed will be mo­bile pro­jects that ad­dress sur­veil­lance or en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues and place em­pha­sis on in­creas­ing peo­ple’s aware­ness of the larger so­cio-po­lit­i­cal con­text of site, often en­cour­ag­ing or en­abling their users to be­come proac­tive and en­gage in local pol­i­tics. The pan­elists will rep­re­sent these dif­fer­ent artis­tic prac­tices within the field of mo­bile media. A major goal of the panel is to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween forms of con­text aware­ness and site-speci­ficity that mo­bile media can pro­duce.

Paper Ab­stracts

To­wards Geospa­tial Cul­tural Plan­ning: Strate­gies for Local Cul­tural In­no­va­tion through Loca­tive New Media Art
by Tanya Toft

Glob­al­iza­tion and de­vel­op­ments in tech­nolo­gies and new mo­bile media have brought about a ‘spa­tial turn’ that has changed spa­tial con­cep­tions and ge­o­graph­i­cal imag­i­na­tions. The cur­rent ’spa­tial turn’ echoes the crit­i­cal con­cepts of space de­vel­oped by Lefeb­vre, de Certeau and Fou­cault in the 1970s with an em­pha­sis on the pro­duc­tion, prac­tices, and pol­i­tics of lived spa­tial­ity. These con­cepts be­came ‘guides’ to a crit­i­cal analy­sis of the de­vel­op­ments and po­ten­tial of loca­tive new media art in the age of mo­bile media.

Today’s de­vel­op­ments in map­ping and GIS tech­nolo­gies allow for a new ’spa­tial think­ing’ about a so­cio-spa­tial di­alec­tic: the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the ways in which so­cial processes and so­cial ac­tion shape and ex­plain ge­o­gra­phies and vice versa. Loca­tive media and per­va­sive com­put­ing have re­con­fig­ured our un­der­stand­ings and ex­pe­ri­ences of space and cul­ture—from the mi­cro­cosm of the every­day to the macro­cosm of spa­tial flows. The new ge­o­graph­i­cal pur­suits of loca­tive new media art are site-spe­cific ex­plo­rations of a human ge­og­ra­phy.

This paper ex­plores the po­ten­tial of loca­tive new media art as a strate­gic cat­a­lyst for urban re­vi­tal­iza­tion and com­mu­nity de­vel­op­ment. Loca­tive media allow for ac­tive com­mu­nity par­tic­i­pa­tion and ex­pres­sion; for urban and cul­tural nar­ra­tives to be dis­cov­ered and ar­tic­u­lated in urban lay­ers; and for aug­men­ta­tion of past or fu­ture re­al­i­ties and vir­tu­al­i­ties. Loca­tive media can en­hance civic en­gage­ment and in­ter­cul­tural cit­i­zen­ship, fos­ter a sense of lo­cal­ity, and thus cre­ate a sus­tain­able com­po­nent for the local com­mu­nity and so­ci­ety at large. These ideas are un­fold­ing in a field that merges or os­cil­lates be­tween loca­tive media and me­di­ated lo­cal­i­ties. They en­cour­age local cul­tural in­no­va­tion by fos­ter­ing site-spe­cific cul­tural un­der­stand­ing. This paper ad­dresses ques­tions such as, what kinds of so­cial/spa­tial re­la­tions are made pos­si­ble through loca­tive new media art pro­jects? And how can these pro­jects be adopted in a cul­tural plan­ning frame­work as cat­a­lysts for local urban and com­mu­nity de­vel­op­ment?

Land­scape, Cul­ture, and the Phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of Tech­no­log­i­cal Me­di­a­tion
by Prof. Jack Toolin

Nei­ther re­flec­tion upon our re­la­tion­ship to the space sur­round­ing us nor tech­no­log­i­cal me­di­a­tion of this re­la­tion­ship are new. How­ever, GPS-en­abled tech­nolo­gies and their grow­ing avail­abil­ity in the past decade have de­cid­edly changed the ways we nav­i­gate, vi­su­al­ize, quan­tify, and ul­ti­mately com­pre­hend the world we move through. This paper will re­flect upon these changes through con­sid­er­a­tion of var­i­ous philo­soph­i­cal per­spec­tives, tech­no­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ments, and ex­am­ples of artis­tic prac­tice that uti­lize loca­tive media, in­clud­ing my pro­jects The C5 Land­scape Ini­tia­tive and Per­cep­tions of the Com­mut­ing Ethno­g­ra­pher.

The grad­ual or sud­den ac­cu­mu­la­tion of all things tech­no­log­i­cal, from hard­ware to soft­ware, has gone hand in hand with a shift in think­ing about the human con­di­tion from a phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal aware­ness to an in­ter­sub­jec­tive con­scious­ness. (That shift has also co­in­cided with the grow­ing ur­ban­iza­tion of the world’s pop­u­la­tion: as of 2008, over half of the world’s pop­u­la­tion lives in towns and cities.) This in­ter­sub­jec­tiv­ity is in­creas­ingly me­di­ated by the ever shrink­ing, trans­portable, and in­stan­ta­neous media with which we have be­come en­twined. Loca­tive media have be­come in­creas­ingly lo­ca­tion-aware and com­merce-ready, po­si­tion­ing us in the ge­o­graph­i­cal and cul­tural land­scape. In other words, they are more and more aware of our phys­i­cal and psy­cho­graphic re­la­tion­ship to the world around us. The paper will ex­plore the na­ture of our phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal re­la­tion­ship to this tech­nol­ogy and the world that it me­di­ates.

Kines­thetic At­tune­ment: Walk­ing, Talk­ing, Lis­ten­ing, Know­ing
by Prof. Teri Rueb

Each of my works re­quire ex­ten­sive in­ter­ac­tion with sites through the sim­ple act of walk­ing. Both in pro­duc­tion and re­cep­tion, my work emerges through a process that I have come to think of as a form of “kines­thetic at­tune­ment.” Walk­ing is the ground from which my work evolves as a form of ex­pe­ri­en­tial knowl­edge. It is also the basis upon which I seek to chal­lenge and cri­tique ab­stract mod­els of spa­tial rep­re­sen­ta­tion and the the­o­ret­i­cal foun­da­tions of tech­nolo­gies as­so­ci­ated with loca­tive media. Draw­ing upon the phi­los­o­phy of em­bod­i­ment as well as an­thro­po­log­i­cal meth­ods and ethno­graphic prac­tices em­ployed in cur­rent pro­jects, I will dis­cuss in­sights from my over fif­teen years ex­pe­ri­ence mak­ing site-spe­cific sound and media in­stal­la­tions using GPS and other lo­ca­tion-sens­ing tech­nolo­gies.

Bios of the Par­tic­i­pants

Chris­tiane Paul is the Di­rec­tor of the Media Stud­ies Grad­u­ate Pro­grams and As­so­ci­ate Prof. of Media Stud­ies at The New School, NY, and Ad­junct Cu­ra­tor of New Media Arts at the Whit­ney Mu­seum of Amer­i­can Art. She has writ­ten ex­ten­sively on new media arts and lec­tured in­ter­na­tion­ally on art and tech­nol­ogy. Her re­cent books are Con­text Providers – Con­di­tions of Mean­ing in Media Arts (In­tel­lect, 2011), co-edited with Mar­got Love­joy and Vic­to­ria Vesna; New Media in the White Cube and Be­yond (UC Press, 2008); and Dig­i­tal Art (Thames and Hud­son 2003; ex­panded new edi­tion 2008). At the Whit­ney Mu­seum, she cu­rated the shows “Cory Ar­can­gel: Pro Tools” (May 2011), “Pro­fil­ing” (2007), and “Data Dy­nam­ics” (2001); the net art se­lec­tion for the 2002 Whit­ney Bi­en­nial; the on­line ex­hi­bi­tion “CODe­DOC” (2002) for art­port, the Whit­ney Mu­seum’s on­line por­tal to In­ter­net art for which she is re­spon­si­ble; as well as “Fol­low Through” by Scott Pa­ter­son and Jen­nifer Crowe (2005). Other re­cent cu­ra­to­r­ial work in­cludes “Ed­uardo Kac: Biotopes, La­go­glyphs and Trans­genic Works” (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010); Bi­en­nale Quadri­lat­erale (Ri­jeka, Croa­tia, 2009-10); “Feed­for­ward - The Angel of His­tory” (co-cu­rated with Steve Dietz; Lab­o­ral Cen­ter for Art and In­dus­trial Cre­ation, Gijon, As­turias, Spain, 2009-2010) and INDAF Dig­i­tal Art Fes­ti­val (In­cheon, Korea, Aug. 2009).

Tanya Toft re­cently re­ceived her dou­ble MA in Media Stud­ies from The New School, NY, and in Mod­ern Cul­ture and Cul­tural Dis­sem­i­na­tion with pro­file in Ur­ban­ity and Aes­thet­ics from Copen­hagen Uni­ver­sity. Her re­search is fo­cused on the in­ter­re­la­tion­ship be­tween new media art and the trans­for­ma­tion of urban spaces and so­cio-spa­tial struc­tures, which she ex­plores in a com­bined frame­work of artis­tic and strate­gic de­vel­op­ment. In her mas­ter’s the­sis she de­vel­ops a re­think­ing of urban cul­tural plan­ning in the ’tem­po­rary’ cul­tural log­ics of the dig­i­tal city and pro­poses the me­dia-ar­chi­tec­tural event as a tem­po­ral, me­di­ated cat­a­lyst for urban de­vel­op­ment and re­vi­tal­iza­tion. She has pre­sented her re­search at The Trans­for­ma­tion of the 21st Cen­tury City 2010; Me­diaC­ity 2010; Crit­i­cal Themes Grad­u­ate Stu­dent Con­fer­ence 2011; The City: Cul­ture, So­ci­ety, Tech­nol­ogy 2011; and EURA Con­fer­ence: The City With­out Lim­its 2011.

Teri Rueb works at the in­ter­sec­tion of in­ter­ac­tive media, sound, land, and en­vi­ron­men­tal art. She pi­o­neered the form of GPS-based in­ter­ac­tive in­stal­la­tion with her pro­ject “Trace,” which was de­vel­oped at the Banff Cen­tre for the arts from 1996-1999. She is the re­cip­i­ent of nu­mer­ous awards in­clud­ing a Prix Ars Elec­tron­ica Award of Dis­tinc­tion in 2008 for her pro­ject “Core Sam­ple” set on a land­fill in the Boston Har­bor. Her site-spe­cific works have been pre­sented in con­texts as var­ied as the Wad­den Sea, the Heath­land and the Old­en­burg Botan­i­cal Gar­den in North­ern Ger­many, the Boston Com­mon and Pub­lic Gar­dens, the Viru Keskus shop­ping mall in post-So­viet Tallinn, Es­to­nia, the Berlin Tier­garten, and high­way sys­tems across the United States. She re­cently com­pleted her doc­tor­ate at the Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Grad­u­ate School of De­sign where her re­search fo­cused on con­struc­tions of wilder­ness and sub­jec­tiv­ity in mo­bile net­work so­ci­ety. Her work has been funded by the Banff Cen­ter for the Arts, Edith Russ Site, Klang­pol, LEF Foun­da­tion, Turbulence.​org, and Art­slink and many state arts coun­cils. From 2004-2009 she served as found­ing fac­ulty and was later ap­pointed De­part­ment Head of the grad­u­ate Dig­i­tal + Media De­part­ment at the Rhode Is­land School of De­sign. Rueb is cur­rently Pro­fes­sor in the Media Study De­part­ment at the Uni­ver­sity at Buf­falo (SUNY) where she is Founder and Di­rec­tor of Open Air In­sti­tute, a plat­form for con­nect­ing field-based learn­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ner­ships at the in­ter­sec­tion of land­scape, tech­nol­ogy, media art and de­sign.

Jack Toolin is an artist work­ing in new media, dig­i­tal imag­ing, and per­for­mance. His work con­sid­ers con­tem­po­rary life in light of the chang­ing po­lit­i­cal, eco­nomic, and tech­no­log­i­cal land­scape, and has been pre­sented na­tion­ally and in­ter­na­tion­ally. High­lights in­clude: the Whit­ney Mu­seum of Amer­i­can Art (2002 Bi­en­nial); the Walker Art Cen­ter, Min­neapo­lis, Min­nesota; Ars Elec­tron­ica, Linz, Aus­tria; the San José Mu­seum of Art, San José, Cal­i­for­nia; Foxy Pro­duc­tion, New York City. His work Per­fect View was ex­hib­ited at the Chelsea Art Mu­seum Pro­ject Room in 2010. He was a mem­ber of the new media col­lab­o­ra­tive C5 (1997 - 2007) which in­ves­ti­gated cul­ture’s re­la­tion­ship to tech­nol­ogy through data vi­su­al­iza­tion, in­stal­la­tion, and per­for­mance ex­pe­di­tion. He is cur­rently a vis­it­ing as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor at Pratt In­sti­tute in Brook­lyn, New York, and an ad­junct pro­fes­sor at the Poly­tech­nic In­sti­tute at NYU. He has lec­tured widely, at in­sti­tu­tions such as the Rhode Is­land School of De­sign; Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley; the San Fran­cisco Art In­sti­tute; Emer­son Col­lege, Boston; Kibla Mul­ti­me­dia Cen­ter, Mari­bor, Slove­nia; the Mu­seum of Con­tem­po­rary Art Ri­jeka, Croa­tia; and the Uni­ver­sity of Split, Croa­tia. He holds a B.F.A. in pho­tog­ra­phy from Ohio Uni­ver­sity, and an M.F.A. in in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tice from San Jose State Uni­ver­sity.

“The Situationist Drawing Device is a backpack-sized mechanism for recording the experience of landscape. Designed by Ji Soo Han and Paul Ornsby, and operating by way of mirrors, the Device “records a journey taken in an altered state of perception through drawing.” It is an “intermediary and interpretative tool,” the designers add, one that stands between the human body and the landscape it exists within and explores.” [via]