Symposium | 5uper.net Coded Cultures - Exploring Creative Emergences, Vienna 2009

- Concepts
- Visions
- Project Designs
- Theories ...

- Artifact Modding
- D.I.Y. Media
- Circuit Bending
- Device Art ...

- Locative Media
- Geo-Spatial Art
- Playful Environments ...

- Micro Communities
- Counter Cultures
- Knowledge Clusters
- Selforganized Network ...

Coded Cultures - Symposium

The symposium of “CODED CULTURES – Exploring Creative Emergences” combines theoretical lectures, artist presentations and keynotes structured through the four sub-topics of the festival: Designing Complexity, Assembling Things, Expanding Locality and Creating Proto-Culture.

The selected positions are raising questions about the transformation of cultural codes in different areas of creative selforganization and give an opportunity to discuss these on an international and trans-disciplinary level. The artist panels give an inside look on emerging forms of aritstic practices and on related issues of creative development.

Unveiling the technological process
Lecturer: Fumihiko Sumitomo (JP)

The amount of information we receive daily is enormous, and much follows complex processes. This process is almost like the automated program made to satisfy our desire. It is the simulation which made the human thought simple so as to be easily repeated many times by machine. When they are connected to each other, the complexity consequently increases much more to alienate a human intervention. Then you will probably hear the voice of insisting user friendly interfaces, but then it conceals how the technology functions. It seems that information technology is intelligent enough to meet our desire but it often means that we become the target of marketing. We cannot avoid being mediated with the world with technologically produced pictures and texts. What is the role imposed on an artist? It is to disclose its function of this pseudo-human technology by executing a game with giving an unexpected element in their program. It re-affirms the freedom of our life since it turns into an independent state out of relationship of interest. Indeed the work of exonemo and their performances are such games, from which i will present several examples to contextualize my thoughts.

Hisashi Muroi - Problems of the Body beyond Coded Cultures

Problems of the Body beyond Coded Cultures
Lecturer: Hisashi Muroi (JP)

What is forgotten in the current pop culture and digital culture is the “body”. The way of speaking as if the human brain will be directly connected to cyberspace, or the whole universe will be transposed to binary data is nothing but a kind of metaphor. The actual problems are always and already arising inside our “bodies”. New media makes “samplings” of the real world in new codes, and make new relations between the body and the world. It means that media are extension of the body. However, to extend the body does not mean anything more than driving cars, or becoming invincible hero in the fighting games. We are not always living with attaching such devices in our daily lives. For example, it is becoming almost impossible for Japanese young people to live without mobile phones, and they are receiving and sending e-mails anytime and anywhere. The act of typing with the thumb is indispensable elements of their everyday lives. However, it’s not connected to only their desire for communication, but also to the pleasure of body that comes from pressing keys with their thumbs. „If this act were not comfortable for the body in the beginning, they would never so much devote themselves into sending e-mails. That is, the body always enables such feeling before the media or technologies. Thus, we should not forget that the “body” in the “exterior” of codes is forming our new experiences.

Keynote Assembling Things: Device Art
Lecturer: Machiko Kusahara (JP)

Device Art is a new concept that represents Japanese media art practice, that bridges art, technology, science, design, entertainment and popular culture. Today convergence of art, design and architecture has been shown at major art exhibitions, reflecting the questions raised on the validity of borders that have long separated these categories. In contemporary Japanese media art elements such as playfulness, open interaction and use of latest technology are highly visible, while entertainment, commercial products and educational contents created by artists attract public attention. Device Art tries to theorize these phenomena from both media art and historical points of view.

Keynote Creating Proto-Culture: Infogenic Art
Lecturer: Manfred Faßler (DE)

Information emerges in collisions, encounters and selections, not in streams. As formative elements of the m.i.t.-World (mediamorphic, infogenic, technogenic) encounter, collision and interaction define the conditions of autopoietic, creative, and decisive selection. They are located somewhere in between informational self-references and formative practices, not so much as general differences, but as variable interpretations, twists and fluxes of interrelation. Information is pure interactivity, not pure mathematics. Information as preselected and globally processed data-cluster is always »Informations« the global macro-diversity of 0/1 only exists under the translation and selectivity of micro-diversity, of bio- and system-diversity, under the parameters of Online-Offline-Localisation of actors. That has nothing to do with hybridisations, but with coevolutionary change, in which art is part.

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Hiroshi Yoshioka

Keynote Designing Complexity:
To develop a political intervention in the digital realm
Lecturers: Marina Grzinic (SLO) Hiroshi Yoshioka (JP)

“Everything, everywhere, everybody” implies a fundamentally misleading situation of “fluid identity.” It is not identity itself that is fluid but instead, the variety of different roles we are forced to perform today in order “to adjust” and synchronize ourselves “in time” with the mad sped-up logic of capital. Quickly changing roles and performing according to different codes are first and foremost required of and exercised by those who are not in power. Strategically speaking, artists must be flexible to survive in the first place and this flexibility is particularly effective on the Internet. Flexibility of identity produces a flexibility of contexts and transforms artists and activists subjugated to the digital elites, and constantly pressured by communication, information exchange and isolated digital creativity. Such a context produces an apolitical position. To develop a political intervention in the digital realm is imperative.

To have a sense of complexity is crucial for us to live in this age of media, technology and planetary cultures. Complexity implies spontaneity, emergence of something new, or the potential of creating from within, while complicatedness just the whole consisted of many parts which should be controlled from above. We learned this sense of complexity from natural science and system theory, but we should enlarge the concept to understand ourselves and our situations. An image of one culture is generated through the complex process of separations and interactions between the self and the other. Tolerating multiple cultures is not enough: we should also find a multitude in our single culture, whether singleness refers to a nation, a religion or any other traditions. One great benefit of the development of media technology is that it has prepared a hyperspace in the social and cultural context, where we interact each other with a higher sense of mutual formations.

Keynote Expanding Locality:
The Art and Science of Interface and Interaction Design
Lecturers: Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau (AT)

Artists and designers in the area of interactive art have been conducting artistic research in human-machine interaction for a number of years now. Interaction and interface design have not only had their roots in human computer interaction engineering but have also seen parallel developments in performance art, media art and specifically in the interactive arts. With products of interactive technologies increasingly spreading into our private and professional lives, it is interesting to see where early notions of interactivity came from and how artists and designers over the past 40 or more years have already looked at the merits of interaction in their artistic and conceptual work.
From media art archeology to contemporary interactive art – the term interactivity is based on a vivid and ongoing discourse in the fields of interactive art, interaction design, game design, tangible interfaces, auditory interfaces, fashionable technologies, wearable devices, intelligent ambiences, sensor technologies, telecommunication, media facades and new experimental forms of human-machine, human-human and machine-machine interactions. In this lecture artistic and social notions of interactivity will be addressed and the general question on how art and science can merge in the area of interface culture will be discussed.

Martin Pichlmair - The Process and the Artefact

The Process and the Artefact
Lecturer: Martin Pichlmair (AT)

In the lecture I will trace back a number influences on contemporary playful art forms (e.g. art games, interactive art, device art). Some of the preconditions for the emergence of playful art might be found in Marcel Duchamp’s influence on the art world, some in the heritage of the dadaists, situationists, and practitioners of pataphysique. The preconditions in question are: valuing the process, being open for the experiment, artifacts replacing objects, and risking commercial viability. This lecture will invite a discussion about gadget benders as artists, the reinterpretation of the world as a game, and the economy of attention. And I will strive for finding a new role for the artist in this new media world.

Collapsing Locality – Ludic Locations
Lecturer: Mathias Fuchs (AT)

Place and space are notions that have to be renegotiated once territory is claimed in virtual environments and processes are initiated that we use to watch or engage with in first reality. It seems that ownership of territory, land-theft and homelessness reappear in ludic environments. It also seems to be true that there is a cybergeography of paradisic islands, busy malls and frightening battlegrounds. Non-travelling tourism is a figure of hope for Digital Heritage and for eco-tourism. From maps to routes and from Unreal vehicles to fly-throughs the digital traveller re-enacts modes of transportation that differ pretty little from those prevailing in the age of the horsecart. A discourse on locative aspects of virtual environments will have to find new forms of transport and of travelling to rediscover space and location in e-space. The author suggests to look for ludic locations in the twilight zones of augmented reality, virtual environments and augmented virtuality.

Functional Aesthetics
Lecturer: Sabine Seymour (AT)

Fashionable wearables are ‘designed’ garments and accessories associated with aesthetics, functions, wearability, and technology. As designers of fashionable wearables we view end users as fashionable beings who are attentive to style, aesthetics, and the expressive potential of wearable technologies. Our work includes the composition with enhanced materials, wearable technologies, and electronic textiles.
Our design is based on the notion that garments are the immediate interface to the environment and thus are a constant transmitter and receiver of messages, emotions, and experiences. Our bodies become a link, mediated through fashionable wearables. Fashionable wearables must engage the wearer through the mechanisms of fashion to be more than mere mediators of perception. They must become communicators of style.

Aleatoric Devices
Lecturer: Thomas Fürstner (AT)

If you combine perception-stretching science and technology with practical futurism, you start to get real-world applications. (Jon Lebkowsky)
Therefore it’s pure fun to consider wikis and weblogs as aleatoric devices, as far as one can use them to rearrange every single encoded knowledge snippet in any way possible. This mind shifting technology leads to completely different workflows concerning the acquisition and distribution of knowledge within any scientific or artistic domain because knowledge working and artistic practice become composing.
The term aleatoric was introduced in 1954 by Werner Meyer-Eppler. He borrows the idea from “Théorie des fonctions aléatoires” of André Blanc-Lapierre and Robert Fortet. Meyer-Eppler defines processes within an acoustical context as aleatorically as far as the overall course is predefined although in detail everything stays related to accident. So, aleatoric is less about pure accident then as about small, controlled aberrations within a flow of things.

Urban Playgrounds, Alternate Games
Lecturer: Verena Kuni (DE)

To the core of the city? This way, please: Down the Rabbit Hole. Let us explore its hidden structures, its inner guts. And then let us take over the system… This may be the promise. However, meanwhile most of what comes up under the charismatic umbrella term “Alternate Reality Games” does so thanks to investment of major brands. With “Interactive entertainment” as the main tag, with a “puppet master” leading proactive consumers to the next trendy sellout ARGs are being considered, researched and developed as “a medium for lifestyle, marketing and advertisement”. Sure, this is not a game. Yet, this is not what you’d expect from something called “alternate”? You think whatever might be considered as the potentials of collective intelligence and collective creative could take another direction? Like, in example, towards new ways of research and new ways of taking action in urban space? Ok. Perhaps all you have to do is just to try a little harder. Watch out for the Rabbit Hole. Enter the Game. And find your way to play…

From “Camera Obscura” to “Projectors”
Lecturer: Yukiko Shikata (JP)

After the diffusion of ICT we are heading for the second decade of 21C, can locate ourselves in the substantial shift of world — socio-cultural, geo-political, economical, scientific, among others — beyond the systems established in modern era. The “world” here includes us as active players being involved in the fluctuating flow of information for new emergencies beyond existing fields. It means that each of us autonomously contribute to the world at various level by taking responsibility, and at the same time collaborating each other depending on the situations, where sensing, analyzing, and re-interpreting things would appear as creative process. Here, I raise the shift “From »Camera Obscura« to »Projectors«”. Based on the same system, the former statically fixes the image by the light coming into the box, and the latter, the light from inside projects outside, opens up the dynamic process between the space and things there including our movements and perception. It is the shift from “receiver” to “sender”, and welcomes the new network of things and information, as ever-changing phenomenon triggered with/by us!