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Tag: media art

Webinar: “dialogues – probing the future of creative technology,” March 28

The Creative-Ai (AI and the Artistic Imaginary – WASP-HS, https://www.kth.se/hct/mid/research/cmt/projects/ai-and-the-artistic-imaginary-1.1100143) and MUSAiC (https://musaiclab.wordpress.com) project teams at KTH kindly welcome you to the next seminar in our series “dialogues: probing the future of creative technology” on Friday 28 March, 17-18h (CEST).

This seminar (held on zoom, https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/63477441422) features two artists exploring technology in the context of their work. We start with presentations by both guests followed by a discussion between each other and then the audience.

IMPORTANT: If you wish to join, please send your name (zoom handle) to associate professor Bobby Lee Townsend Sturm JR (KTH) so that you will be admitted.

Guests: Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (PE/SE) and Laura Devendorf (USA)

Paola will talk us through some of her works and performances, focusing on the presence of code, textile, multisensorial experiences, and how her interest in patterns led her to experiment with Artificial Intelligence, all framed within a critical approach to these same technologies and their social impact. She will go through some of the ideas proposed in the Neokhipukamayoq Manifesto regarding the possible development of technologies that are not created in opposition to nature: how would these be if parting from Andean/Indigenous philosophies, and placed within a syncretic, hybrid framework?

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (PE/SE) is an artist and researcher of transdisciplinarity, working with textile assemblages and embroideries, painting, sound, text, digital media, interactive art, A.I. and video.
She explores the boundaries and connections in between tactility, the visual and audio, related to the human voice, to nature, and to synthetic ones whose listening is often considered less harmonious, such as machine or digital noises. Her work is complex: she explores the limits of the senses, examining the concepts of interpretation, translation, and misrepresentation, to reflect on mediated sensorial experiences while questioning the cultural hegemony within the history of Technology and the Arts.

She is the recipient of the Stockholms stads kulturstipendium 2022 and of the Honorary Mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2021. She has also has been awarded the Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant from Google Arts and Culture and Google AI in 2020 and was the winner of the “Local Media: Amazon Ecoregion: contest of Vivo Arte.mov in Brazil, 2013. Her works are in collections of the Swedish Public Art Agency and Malmo City Museum.

Laura Devendorf will present a speculation rooted in her experience weaving electronics and developing software for weaving electronics. Laura will introduce the basics of woven structure in terms of its mechanical properties as well as methods by which it is designed and manipulated. Laura will also present some of the exciting opportunities for design and interaction when we consider weaving as a method of electronics production: such as the ability for textile structures to unravel, mended, and to be continually modified. Each of these underlying discussions will frame a provocation about alternative ways we might build, use, and unbuild our electronic products.

Laura Devendorf, assistant professor of information science with the ATLAS Institute, is an artist and technologist working predominantly in human-computer interaction and design research. She designs and develops systems that embody alternative visions for human-machine relations within creative practice. Her recent work focuses on smart textiles—a project that interweaves the production of computational design tools with cultural reflections on gendered forms of labor and visions for how wearable technology could shape how we perceive lived environments. Laura directs the Unstable Design Lab. She earned bachelors’ degrees in studio art and computer science from the University of California Santa Barbara before earning her PhD at UC Berkeley School of Information. She has worked in the fields of sustainable fashion, design and engineering. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, has been featured on National Public Radio, and has received multiple best paper awards at top conferences in the field of human-computer interaction.

The Posthumanities Hub Seminar “Re:Sound – Sound as Evidential Medium in an Age of Crisis”, ONLINE 28th January at 13:15 (CET)

The Stars Beneath Our Feet (2015), video still. (© Louise Mackenzie)

Welcome to the first session in The Posthumanities Hub Seminar Series 2021!

When: 28 Jan 2021, 13:15-15:00 (CET)
Where: Zoom (link will be sent out after registration). Please, have your name visible upon entering.
Registration: In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub[at]gmail.com by 26th January 2021 at noon (CET) the latest.
Recording: The session will be recorded, and possibly also made available online at a later stage. By attending the seminar, you accept these conditions (and can of course choose to keep your camera switched off).

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ABSTRACT
This session, moderated by Morten Søndergaard and Janna Holmstedt, will focus on sound as evidence and sonic explorations in the hybrid field between scientific and artistic practices. It seeks to look beyond the visual, attend to sonically mediated phenomena, and explore how sound and listening might offer ways to navigate fields and areas on the borders of uncertainty and imagination in an age of crisis.

The seminar gathers the contributors to the recently released Special Section (ed. Morten Søndergaard) of Leonardo Music Journal (LMJ) Vol. 30, December 2020 (all the articles are available online). The artist-researchers who have contributed to this Special Section, follow a line of inquiry into the construction of evidence and its ethical implications. Søndergaard suggests that geopolitical situations of crisis force us to look at the politics of evidence – and how it is being practiced. In doing so, it operates between scientific and aesthetic modes of approximation. It is this intricate relation between world, data, sound, representation and causality the Special Section is investigating. The main claim running through all the articles is that this relation is as intricate as it is challenging, and that we need to reimagine what evidence is, reclaim its politics, through sound.

Here, listening emerges as a shared orientation and critical mode of inquiry in technological layered and mediated environs, a strategy even, for moving the taken for granted – the unnoticed or oppressed background – to the affective foreground, as well as a form of activism and resistance. In different ways, the artist-researchers explore the potential of a sonic sensibility that can reorient the politics of visibility.

In the LMJ Special Section, Tullis Rennie investigates sociosonic interventions in the context of social engaged art, and the role of disruption and distributed authorship. Laura Beloff, in her contribution on human-plant relations, asks: What does it mean to hear through technological mediation? Louise Mackenzie further investigates technologically embodied and layered forms of looking and listening to nonhuman entities such as microorganisms, while Marie Højlund and Morten Riis invite us to consider processes of transduction and atmospheres as relational attunements in their sonic interventions with wind mills. Janna Holmstedt suggests that “the transformative role of sound and listening troubles Western knowledge systems in fruitful ways”, and Stephanie Loveless proposes the flaneuserie sonore, feminist soundwalking, as a way to recontextualize the practice of walking in literature and art, arguing for listening as a feminist and ecologically oriented mode of engaging with the world. Freya Zinovieff and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda further demonstrate that “to listen attentively to the sonic is to situate oneself at the intersection of geopolitics and sensory perception” in what they, with Pratt and Haraway, term Anthropocene Contact Zones.

BIOGRAPHIES
Laura Beloff is an active artist and accidental academic working in the intersection of art, science and technology. She currently works at Aalto University, Finland.
Marie Højlund is a sound artist, composer and assistant professor in sound studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She received her PhD in 2017 with her thesis on sound, noise and atmospheres in Danish hospitals: “Overhearing—An Attuning Approach to Noise in Danish Hospitals.”
Morten Riis is a sound artist and composer and holds a PhD degree in electronic music from Aarhus University. He has written articles and books on artistic research and music technology, conducted workshops over most of Europe and has received commissions from leading festivals and ensembles in Denmark, Germany and Poland.
Janna Holmstedt is an artist and researcher investigating listening as a situated practice, composition in the expanded field and the cultivation of care and environmental attention. She is part of the research group The Posthumanities Hub, and received her PhD in 2017 with her thesis “Are You Ready for a Wet Live-In? Explorations into Listening”. She currently works at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and National Historical Museums, Sweden.
Stephanie Loveless is a sound artist and a lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she directs and the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer. She holds MFAs from Bard College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Louise Mackenzie is an artist and researcher based in the U.K., affiliated with the Cultural Negotiation of Science research group, Northumbria University.
Tullis Rennie is a composer, improvising trombonist, electronic musician and field recordist. He is cofounder of Walls on Walls and senior lecturer in music at City, University of London.
Freya Zinovieff is a sound artist and theorist who uses emerging technologies to research the geopolitics of sound in borderlands. 
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda researches the histories of media arts from a feminist perspective and produces interactive installations. She has degrees in graphic design, visual arts and cultural history.
Morten Søndergaard is an active curator, exhibition designer and academic working in the intersection of art, science and technology. He is currently working at Aalborg University, Denmark.

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