RIXC ART-SCIENCE RESIDENCY

• 13th July 2018
• air

Karolina MAJEWSKA. VR is an Empathy Switch
The 21st century has confronted humanity with grave problems, including the refugee crisis and homelessness. This paper will examine how VR can grant the opportunity to alter human attitudes and perceptions towards such issues by encouraging empathy for those afflicted.
A VR experience transports a user’s physical presence to see the world through the eyes of a homeless man in San Francisco or a young Syrian girl in a European refugee camp. The viewer transcends mere observation and becomes a participant.
Research suggests that the prime benefit of VR is full immersion of the viewer, utterly transposing their reality and – via this deeply engaging experience – eliciting a previously unobtainable empathy.
While the potential benefits of VR are exciting, the same technology could be misused to manipulate the mind, cloud perspective, and leave us vulnerable to increased observation and control. It seems significant that large corporations – the Googles and Facebooks – are investing colossal sums in VR development.
My research proposes to fully explore the twin potentials of VR, both in terms of the gifts of empathy and understanding, and the menace of surveillance and manipulation.

Karolina Majewska is a visual artist working in New York and Warsaw. She has MFAs from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Visual Art in NYC. Her recent work has combined VR, spatial painting, and performance. Karolina investigates the varied ways that technology manipulates human perception, as she questions the impact of applied science upon the human capacity for empathy. Her curiosity has been inspired by the transformative and teleportative possibilities of VR/AR and 360-degree cameras, as explored in her present digital project, The Cell.

Ilva SKULTE, Normunds KOZLOVS. Technopoetical Elements Of Media Constructed Reality: Age Of Algorithmic Imagination
Poetical aspects of technic and the special kind of (dialectic) relationship between the generating, creation, production and knowledge have a long history of discussion and reasoning and a rich collection of arguments and approaches. This can be used as a base for deeper understanding of how contemporary media producing news, stories and reflections are involved in constructing the ways we know, think and act in the reality. Of a particular interest here is the role of algorithms – procedures aimed on effective solving of problems – that are more and more deeply integrated in all human actions including everyday rituals performed for creation of consensual knowledge about (social) reality (construction of reality). In his recent book “What Algorithms Want. Imagination in the Age of Computing”, Ed Finn speaks about algorithmic imagination in order to understand tensions between human and machinal in part starting in tensions between effective solution of a problem and its function as computational process behind of “how the algorithm really works as a process that runs forever, persistently modeling reality.” (Finn, E. (2017). What algorithms want: Imagination in the age of computing. MIT Press., pp.42.)
In this paper we are going to analyse the parallels and contradictions in poetical and technical aspects of creation of a message in the social context as well as potential of technopoetical aesthetics in the algorithmic culture. Our attempt to find out how work of algorithms can be understood in the traditional philosophical framework of techne, poiesis and episteme with a special attention to the work of Russian Marxist thinkers of early 20th century.

Ilva Skulte, Dr. Philol., Assoc. Prof. has a doctoral degree in history of language from Latvian University. Since 2001, she is working at the Department of Communication in Riga Stradins University, Latvia last 9 years as a Director of Master Programm for Communication and Media Studies. Having tought and written about history of media and reflecting the changes in culture caused by new media she discovered the importance of media literacies (especially, digital literacies) in the context of childhood and school, the area of research where some of her latest contributions are made.
Normunds Kozlovs has philosophy and sociology study background at Latvia University as well as social work education praxis in higher school “Attīstība” and currently is lecturing at Riga Stradins University’s communication department as well as Liepaja Pedagogic University’s program for new media art. His academic interest is counter- culture ideology. Articles on dandyism, camp esthetics and steam punk are published by arterritory.com The papers in English and Latvian are collected at the site: http://rsu-lv.academia.edu/NormundsKozlovs

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.

Tivon RICE. The Voices of Nandimul X (VR film)
The Voices of Nandimul X (2018) – 3 short-films for VR. Nandimul X is a ghost living within an artificial intelligence, or more precisely, within a machine learning model trained on the complete works of science fiction author J.G. Ballard. As this language model describes images of mysterious landscapes and structures, it both hallucinates Ballard’s artistic style and recalls his many critiques of modernism and its effects on architecture, urban life, and the natural environment.
This project creatively addresses the processes of photogrammetry and machine learning as forms of archiving: photogrammetry as a mode of reconstructing depth from large bodies of 2d images, and machine learning as a strategy for recreating the voice or style of an artist, by analyzing large corpora of texts, images, sound, etc.
Originally commissioned for the 2018 Modern Body Laboratory in Den Haag NL, The Voices of Nandimul X explores the festival’s theme of permanence in a post-digital world, and asks: how do histories reside in physical spaces? Can images accumulate a significance over time, different than that of the object within the image? And how may our imaginations of an afterlife be impacted by A.I. systems that are increasingly capable of archiving and emulating an individual’s creative output.
Made possible by The Modern Body Festival, Yukun Zhu, Google Artists and Machine Intelligence, Maxwell Forbes, and the University of Washington Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Narration by Kevin Walton.

Dani PLOEGER. Frontline (360-video immersive installation)
‘frontline’ combines uneventful 3D 360 video documentation of a frontline position in the Donbass War in East-Ukraine with a spectacular battlefield soundscape produced in a movie studio. The work intertwines the documentary and the fictional in a representation of warfare that unsettles the promises of realism commonly associated with both documentary practice and virtual reality technology, and undermines the expectations of spectacle that often surround representations of warfare.

Dani Ploeger combines performance, video, computer programming and electronics hacking to investigate and subvert the spectacles of techno-consumer culture. Re-purposing, misusing, and at times destroying everyday devices, his work examines seemingly banal and taken-for-granted aspects of digital culture as objects of both physical beauty and political power.
He has worked with traditional metal workers in Cairo to encase tablet computers in plate steel, made a VR installation while embedded with frontline troops in East-Ukraine, and travelled to dump sites in Nigeria to collect electronic waste originating from Europe. He is a Research Fellow at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, and an artist-researcher at the University of Leiden, Netherlands.