RIXC ART-SCIENCE RESIDENCY

• 13th July 2018
• air

Jasmine GUFFOND. The Web Never Forgets (web performance)
‘Listening Back’ is a creative research project focused on the proliferation of ubiquitous online surveillance and the methods by which our information flows are intercepted by mechanisms that monitor and control. It is also the title of a custom made plug-in for the Chrome browser. A practical outcome of my artistic research, this browser plug-in sonically notifies Internet users of the tracking cookies that collect personal and identifying data by storing a file on your computer. By translating internet cookies into sound ‘Listening Back’ functions to expose real-time digital surveillance and consequently the ways in which our everyday relationships to being surveilled have become normalised. By directly intervening with the World Wide Web as a technological, social and political platform, this project explores how sound can help us engage with complex phenomena beyond apparent materiality. By sonifying a largely invisible tracking technology ‘Listening Back’ critiques a lack of transparency inherent to online monitoring technologies and the broader context of opt in / default cultures intrinsic to contemporary modes of online connectivity. By engaging listening as a mode of examination this project asks what is the potential of sound as a tool for transparent questioning?

Jasmine Guffond is an artist working at the interface of social, political and technical infrastructures. Through the sonification of data she addresses the potential for sound to engage with contemporary political questions. Interested in providing an audible presence for phenomena that usually lies beyond human perception, via the sonification of facial recognition algorithms, global networks, or internet tracking cookies she questions what it means for our identities, choices and personalities to be reduced to streams of data. She is a current PhD candidate at UNSWAD, Sydney Australia conducting research into sound as a method of investigation into contemporary online surveillance.

Bianca HLYWA. Untitled as for now
Distinguishing life from non-life facilitates a sort of control over that which is considered inanimate. We wish to push the material world radically apart from us, in fear of death and disintegration humans prefer the infinite possibility of the screen-or material pushed to its greatest symbolic capacity-effectively codifying infinity. The ideas is to inhabit the moment where the inanimate becomes animate, and the distinction between self and other becomes blurry. The practise is cultivating a six foot by four foot symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. I have utilized the process of anaerobic ethanol fermentation and anaerobic organic acid fermentation along an oxygen gradient to create a layer of gelatinous cellulose-based biofilm which looks a lot like a thick layer of skin. Alongside this growth, I have been working to construct a robotic arm which will lift this living biological film out of its womb, which is a giant low lying glass vat. The lifting of the culture would take place during the exhibition of the work over the period of a couple of hours in a tight space that confronts the viewers with a foreign life form that challenges the size of the human body
MISSING BIO

Marc DaCosta. Making Sense of the Ether
The airwaves can be a cacophonous place. Signals from GPS satellites exist alongside bluetooth headsets and the dispatch channels of police stations. The emergence of low-cost Software Defined Radios (SDRs) have made this world more accessible than ever. In this talk I will discuss how public data can be joined with the electromagnetic spectrum to better understand the world around us. In the first portion of the talk, I will discuss how governments regulate the usage and ownership of the electromagnetic spectrum. The data residue of this process can be used for everything from geo-locating electronic border surveillance infrastructure to discovering the location and transmission frequency of every McDonald’s drive-thru radio. In the second portion of the talk, I will discuss how various protocols for data transmission can be decoded and joined with contextual public data. For instance, every cargo ship emits an “Automated Identification System” signal that can be joined with shipping records to understand what the ship is carrying. By the end of the talk, I hope attendees will leave with a richer sense of how the radio waves are being used and the tools necessary to critically explore them further.
MISSING BIO

Jade BOYD. Wave-lengths Hitherto Undetected
Jade Boyd’s presentation centres around her recent artwork, ‘Wave-Lengths Hitherto Undetected.’ The installation, named after William Crookes’ ideas on potential higher forms of telepathic communication, measures the changing electrical potential within three sets of Oyster mushrooms and converts these into light. Specifically, a sensor, an Arduino and dimmer translate the signal from the mushrooms into light on a lamp, which varies in brightness according to the strength of the signal. Anything that changes the electromagnetic fields within the space around the mushrooms will alter their electrical potential, including mobile phones and other electronic devices, human proximity – and human touch. In this way, inter-species communication takes place between human and fungi. This communication is manifest synthetically in the form of both light, via the lamp, and sound, via the Spooky Tesla Spirit Radio, which produces audio in response to changes in EM fields and light and also receives AM radio transmissions. Contact with the mushrooms via touch allows for haptic compositions. A circuit between the four elements – the mushrooms, humans, radio and light box is created. Veering between science and the occult, this organic-electronic synthesis suggests that there may be forces at work that humans are yet to detect.

Jade Boyd’s artistic practice reflects the ways she is “…fascinated by the capacity of technology for manifesting the otherwise unseen forces which govern our existence…” (Joseph Stannard, (The Wire) 2011). A PhD candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, Jade works with audio, video and installation, often in a live setting and in collaboration with musicians and sound artists (as in Unsound festival). She has presented her research at GANZA (Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia), Auckland, NZ (2017); PopCaanz, Sydney (2016); Revelation Film Festival Academic Conference, Perth (2015 and 2014); Exist-ence symposium, QLD College of Arts, Brisbane (2013)
 and most recently, PopCaanz, Wellington, NZ (2017), with her article “The Electro-mystical Machines of Lovecraft and Pynchon” published. www.jadeboyd.nl

Oksana CHEPELYK. Virtual and Natural, Global Data and Local Ecosystem: Ukrainian Case Study
IZOLYATSIA. Platform for cultural initiatives from Donetsk has been occupied by Russian militaries since 2014, was forced to move to Kyiv. A nomadic institution in exile has produced a plethora of art projects focusing on the scenarios of survival in the current turbulent reality of propaganda and post-truth in order to promote critical thinking, radical design for activism in artworks that take “technology” as their subject matter. Research led within American Arts Incubator (AAI) at IZOLYATSIA were focused on the Dnipro river. The Waters Come Into My Soul project within AAI examines water pollution in Ukraine, particularly along the Dnipro River. The industrial runoff and over abundance of phosphorus, nitrogen and phosphates cause active reproduction of blue-green algae which causes the “Dnipro Blossoming” phenomenon. Using microbial fuel cells with polluted water from the Dnipro and speculative algal bioreactors, Tiare Ribeaux in art project considered converting cyanobacteria and polluted water in the Dnipro into energy for illumination.
Radical Mapping + Speculative Design, Design of a Platform for Dnipro water state monitoring including VR game, where swimmer should avoid some obstacles, size and for form of which are variable, depending on data obtained through low-level Internet protocols: pollutions, microorganisms, audio-visual algorithmic environments.

Dr. Oksana Chepelyk is a leading researcher of The New Technologies Department, Modern Art Research Institute of Ukraine, author of book “The Interaction of Architectural Spaces, Contemporary Art and New Technologies” (2009) and curator of the IFSS, Kyiv. Oksana Chepelyk studied art in Kyiv, followed PhD course, Moscow, Amsterdam University, Banff Centre, Canada, Bauhaus Dessau, Germany, Fulbright Research Program at UCLA, USA. Awards: ArtsLink1997 Award (USA), FilmVideo99 (Italy), EMAF2003 Werklietz Award 2003 (Germany), ArtsLink2007 Award (USA), Artraker Award2013 (UK). Works shown: MOMA, NY; MMA, Zagreb; German Historical Museum, Berlin and Munich; Museum of the Arts History, Vienna; MCA, Skopje; MJT, LA,; Art Arsenal Museum, Kyiv; “DIGITAL MEDIA Valencia”, Spain; MACZUL, Maracaibo, Venezuela, “The File”, Sao Paolo; XVIII LPM 2017 Amsterdam.

MOON Martina Zelenika. A secret way of communication: The perfect language that the global control system can not control
Are we able to develop a new communication system that the global control system can not control? Can a secret language be considered the perfect language?
The paper examines the impact of digital extensions on the intuitive understanding of universal symbol in a form of audio-visual content. In this case I present the audio-visual logograms from my new Augmented Reality mobile application project “6th SENSE”. The integration of Augmented Reality technology isn’t just an ordinary game, but the way we interact with devices and content become a way of communication. How Augmented Reality become a trigger for mind and emotional reactions on a deeper level? In this project, a combination of drawings and sounds, analogue and digital images, makes a unique fusion. Sound and drawing as communication fields can be seen as telepathic or mind communication, or emotionally responsive communication where no words are needed. The main goal of analyzing this creative process is the transformation from one medium to another, focusing mainly on the relationship between visual forms and sounds that results in audio visual design and interaction. It is a study of a universal communication field that has both autonomous and independent features for developing a secret language – the perfect language.

Croatian contemporary artist MOON a.k.a. Martina Zelenika is an independent interdisciplinary artist with a unique artistic expression. By deconstructing meta-language, the artist tests out modern communication space and combines the most up-to-date digital technology along with an analogue one to embody spiritual dimension of universology. Martina Zelenika graduated in 2001 at the Academy of Fine Arts University of Zagreb, and took a master’s in 2006 in the area of Video-New Media at the Academy of Visual Art and Design University of Ljubljana. Martina is a member ADA– database of Virtual Art, Croatian Freelance Artists Association, founder and artistic leader at NAGON– interdisciplinary laboratory of arts based in Zagreb.

Gary Zhexi ZHANG – An Ecological Turn: Aesthetics of Decentralisation
Decentralisation presents itself as a technological panacea and an ideological imperative. By giving a little more agency to the parts over the whole, we give way to a network of emergent interactions of a truly creative kind: a little noise goes a long way. From asynchronous logistics to embodied intelligence, contemporary designers and engineers are mobilising self-organising behaviours and recombinant architectures to organise, optimise, and negotiate complex systems.
As the technological imaginary moves from distributed networks of communication towards decentralised bodies, cities and societies, what does it mean to design for the parts over the whole, govern from the individual over the collective, build the platform over the society? Tracing a line from Victorian evolutionism, Bogdanov’s tectology to systems ecology and contemporary cybernetics, this paper explores what we want from decentralisation, and to examine the possibilities and pitfalls of a paradigm that has promised us so much over its short, technological history. By drawing on past moments in our desire to decentralise, this essay offers an interwoven account of technological diagrams and ecological forms, proposing an feedback loop between the systems we inhabit, the systems we build and the systems we think ourselves to be.
Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer interested in socio-technical objects. His current work explores decentralized organizations such as swarms, mycelia, and markets within the context of aesthetics, cryptography, and work. He works with film, installation, and software. As a writer, Zhang is a regular contributor to Frieze and Elephant magazines, and has also published in Foam, Fireflies and King’s Review. He was recently awarded the MIT Journal of Design and Science essay prize. Recent projects and exhibitions include “Net Work” and the Decentralized Web Summit at the Internet Archive, “Cross-feed” at Glasgow International 2018, vdrome.org (online), and “All Channels Open” at Wysing Arts Centre, Bourn (2017).