The Grid: Exposure

The worlds of art, technology and policy are often understood as distinct enterprises with their own codes, ethics, and practices. Technologies, however, are not simply artifacts, but dynamic systems entwined with culture and politics. While institutional allegiances and disciplinary investments might obscure this entanglement, the stakes are shared - and they are high. Gathering leaders from the sectors of art, technology and policy who have worked to cross these disciplinary boundaries, this discussion represents the Grid’s commitment to bridge international and intercultural differences between the US and EU. It names their shared stakes and seeks a common language grounded in the efforts of those already working at these intersections. With these alliances, how might we build a more inclusive future? Staging the kinds of interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration that animate the Grid, this panel explores how we might overcome siloed thinking to shape artistic innovation and technological development for the benefit of all.

VOIDOPOLIS is a retelling of Dante's Inferno, informed by the grim experience of wandering through NYC during a pandemic. The text, made only with words that do not contain the letter "E, " is an example of synthetic language, composed in collaboration with a modified AI text generating tool. The images are created by ‘wiping’ humans from stock photography. The narrative unfolds on Instagram over 40-ish posts, a digital performance meant to culminate in loss: once the story is complete, it will be deleted forever. VOIDOPOLIS offers a way of practicing the act of forgetting that it was ever made. Its omissions speak to loss—of time, of sickened people—and by itself ultimately disappearing, makes a case for the collective amnesia that emerges from trauma.

For Exposure, new episodes of VOIDOPOLIS are being exhibited on https://www.instagram.com/codame/ over the entire week, from 7 September through 13 September. Check in everyday at 11am for new episodes.

Separate, individual ticket is required for this limited seat experience. Register now!

Blur the lines between intimate and public spaces with Andersmith & Heidi Boisvert as they guide you through collaborative art-making with strangers… all from the comfort of your chair, couch, or bathtub.

Playing in the space between physical and virtual mediation, you will embark on the absurdity of social choreography in human interaction. Together, you gather to rethread the social fabric: devise new gesture vocabularies, bring along physical and emotional keepsakes and connect to the sonic texture of the human voice.

While attempts to reenter the public space are happening in fits and starts, many collective rituals are absent, and our individual identities remain atomized. Let us co-create shared survival mechanisms through everyday gestures to build collective effervescence.

But in our attempts at effervescence, let us not forget that the camera captures all.

Separate, individual ticket is required for this limited seat experience. Register now!

This session poses the question, "What is your vision for a resilient future?" Participants will be asked to travel to a time and place in the future and send a postcard to themselves or a loved one. What will a postcard in the future be like? We will focus on the convergence of art and technology, utilizing virtual platforms as tools for collaboration and engagement. The first engagement will demonstrate how to create and use virtual and augmented reality applications. The second engagement will focus on sharing the postcard interfaces of each participant and having reflective conversations.

Separate, individual ticket is required for this limited seat experience. Register now!

Learn how to separate thinking into six clear functions and roles represented by symbolic "Thinking Hats." By mentally wearing and switching hats, participants can easily focus or redirect thoughts, the conversations and the solutions. Understand the strengths, weaknesses, and your affinity for the different hats to level up your problem solving skills!

https://zoom.us/j/96306599108?pwd=YjMwNHFFZ29JTFEvaFQ4L2ozaWhLZz09

Meeting ID: 963 0659 9108
Passcode: 740953

The US and EU have complementary but divergent funding ecosystems, creating unique cultures of media arts practice in both areas. How does private vs public funding affect the artistic communities and kinds of work produced? What can we learn from the unique features of differing funding systems?

The current global pandemic has had a debilitating effect for arts institutions, collaborative endeavours and audience involvement. Watching yet another Facebook Live streaming video taking place in someone's bedroom or living room has a limited scope. What are some innovative solutions that organizations have developed since the pandemic started? How can creative technologic solutions lead us from 'Zoomification' to true engagement involving artists, audiences, and collaborations across distance networks? When the pandemic ends, what will we be left with? Is this the end of travel as we know it? Will the current solution be temporary, or permanent? This panel explores recent developments in artistic breakthroughs to these vexing challenges.

co-hosted by EUNIC NY and ThoughtWorks Arts

Explore how the world’s leading visual analytics platform is a forum for expression and inspiration by bringing together the worlds of data and art. Join Tableau experts as they walk through the opportunities for expression, understanding, and community-building of visualized data. The conversation will include discussion of pieces that emerged from working alongside traditional creatives, and those that emerged from the search for voices and insights. Take away a valuable understanding of how shifting the lens on data can wield incredible insights and deliver shareable experiences. Learn more about Tableau’s free data visualization software: public.tableau.com

Please click the link below to join the webinar:

https://salesforce.zoom.us/j/61714848183?pwd=QTA3U2FzM1A3QzQrNWErVkVxakFVUT09

Password: 507529

When San Francisco-based electro-acoustic composer George Hurd began work on "Echolocation", he was looking for a way to interpret the emotions and experiences gleaned from extensive travels across the globe, both for work and for pleasure. Since 2017's acclaimed ensemble album "Navigation Without Numbers", Hurd has been expertly fusing classical music with elements of experimental electronic music, sound design and ambient, but "Echolocation" was different - it was more personal.

"My family never traveled and I grew up haunted by the idea of the massive and mysterious world out there," he explained to Arts4All [http://arts4all.org/about/news-blog/george-hurd-echolocation] last year. "I wander places I’ve never been, searching for those perfect sounds - anything unusual and unique that you can’t find anywhere else. The end result is a musical representation of a location that is both artistic and literal, bringing the place itself into the music." Hurd translated these ideas and inspirations into a project that was too big to be contained on one record or a single performance. "Echolocation" is instead an ongoing project, a subscription series that has so far resulted in seven discrete pieces of work, picking apart the sonic landscapes of Oslo, Lisbon, Munich, Nuremberg, Bavaria, Zambujeira do Mar and San Francisco. The project is continuing with soon-to-be-released works based on Barcelona, Berlin, Yosemite, Paris, Brussels and Chicago.

In 2020, COVID-19 has made travel risky and expensive if it's even logistically possible at all. But rather than scrapping the project, Hurd has instead explored ways of interpreting distant places without lamenting his loss of mobility. So "Echolocation" has been reconfigured to recapture a distant nomadic feeling, recalling locations and feelings that, for the moment at least, are just out of reach. Hurd has turned his process inward, examining the nostalgia we experience when reflecting on a lifetime of people, places, sights, smells and sounds. He plans to leave the USA imminently for a move to Europe, so the project has taken on even more personal resonance for Hurd, who will use these artistic reflections as a way to say goodbye to the places he has loved and called home for so many years.

The evolution of the project makes sense for Hurd, who has plenty of experience working on narrative projects. In 2017 he released a soundtrack to the documentary "Chernobyl: Two Days in the Exclusion Zone", and has written extensively for podcasts and film, with music featured on hit CIA mystery podcast "Wind of Change" and "Running from Cops", a podcast investigating the longest-running reality TV show in history: COPS. Fittingly, Hurd has expanded "Echolocation" into an immersive experience using large LED screens that will display footage he collected while traveling cut together with archival material and digitally-designed graphics. COVID-19 may have grounded us for the time being, but art prevails and its power to inspire and remind us of the expansive world outside our four walls has never been more evident.


Editorial: John Twells

Opening Remarks by 
Gerfried Stocker, Artistic Director, Ars Electronica

Roberto Viola, Director-General, DG CONNECT (Directorate General of Communication, Networks, Content and Technology), European Commission

CNMAT live streaming concert AI x MUSIC Festival Opening
The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT)
University of California, Berkeley
 
WAVEGUIDE - 2017 - percussion, distributed audio and electronics (9 min.)
            Music composition and performance by Andrew Blanton
            Text by Yvette Granata
            Composition and software by Andrew Blanton
            Special thanks to Neal Riley for technical support.
 
CORAIL - version 2020 - improvising saxophonist and interactive computer system (9 min.)
          Composition and computer environment design by Edmund Campion, Director, CNMAT
            Tenor Saxophone by Steve Adams
            Software contributions by Manuel Poletti, Matthew Wright, Edmund Campion (and a host of others)
 
This concert is being streamed live from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and made possible by CNMAT Researcher and Technical Director, Jeremy Wagner 
 
 
PROGRAM NOTES:    
 
WAVEGUIDE is an attempt to draw a critical reflection on the growing dependence on networked computation, the new interconnected nature of our artificially intelligent cultural reality and intervene in this newfound intimacy with the glossy black panes of glass. The work was initially conceived to send data from drums on the stage, to a remote server, and back through the audience's cell phones in real time, using the networked infrastructure of the internet as a resonant body for the drums. But in light of the ongoing pandemic, the work uses the infrastructure of the internet to perform through the audience's browsers as they watch the screened performance from remote locations via live video and interactive webpage. Still using the internet as a resonant body, the work creates a multi-headed virtual sound sculpture, connecting the audience and performer in that third virtual space.

CORAIL (Coral) is performed by an improvising saxophonist who interacts with a computer system simply by playing his instrument.  The computer extracts fine details of gesture, pitch, dynamics, durations and silences, then transforms the data into an oceanic sound space. Constrained and guided by the ocean of sound, the soloist is instructed to seek a balance within the environment.  The musician learns to play through playing, and together with the computer-generated responses establishes a feedback and feedforward eco-system. The oceanic sound can be turbulent, but the soloist is instructed to work with the computer as a partner, not an adversary. The musical score for CORAIL consists of a number of "flight training" exercises designed to help the soloist learn to interact without destroying a fragile relationship. It is very easy for any player to create chaos within this system, but a great saxophonist like Steve Adams is able to find beautiful design and that is the goal. The piece is dedicated to John Campion.

In this panel discussion, a group of policy makers, technologists, and artists from Europe, California, and Silicon Valley will debate the findings of Taming Tech, an initiative that brings artists, technologists and politicians from both sides of the Atlantic together. The goal is to find a new global framework that can address some of the downsides of emerging technologies that impact our human dignity (“human downgrading”), without ignoring their potential benefit.

In Partnership with:

Center for Humane Technology
STARTS
EU Delegation
BOZAR
Ars Electronica
Open Austria

Separate, individual ticket is required for this limited seat experience. Register now!

Bring worlds of your imagination to life by sketching them out on 360 spherical panoramas! Use a digital or analog workflows to explore drawing on a equirectangular grid. Participants will visit each other's immersive images through standard web apps or VR devices (including cardboard).

This workshop will start your journey in learning how to create 360 degree panoramic sketches using whatever drawing medium that you like.
Plan on having whatever option you chose ready to use at the start of the workshop.

Workshop Options:

1. Paper Equirectangular Grid + digital camera or your mobile phone
2. Any drawing app that supports layers (like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fresco, Paint.net, ProCreate, etc)
3. The Sketch 360 app that I built

We will cover:

• Understanding the equirectangular projection
• Metadata workflow
• Viewing & sharing sketches
• 360 sketch videos
• We will have ample time to construct and iterate on our 360 sketches with a hands-on (via Zoom desktop sharing) workshop

360 sketching is useful for a variety of people

• Architects
• VR designers
• Urban sketchers
• 3D game designers
• 360 video storyboard artists
• Illustrators and artists

The Sound of You is part of Sonami’s Magnetic Memories series, which expands on the use of her Spring Spyre. With SUE-C on live video processing.

After 25 years performing with her iconic lady’s glove, Sonami's attention turned to Machine Learning and its application to performance. In 2012 she created the Spring Spyre. The instrument uses ML (Rebecca Fiebrink's Wekinator) for the manipulation of real time audio synthesis.

Sonami’s intention was to “train the system to never learn” so it would be left exploring synthesis terrains of various spans. Sonami can adjust what she refers to as the “predictability index” by controlling the roaming parameters in ML.

The Sound of You is a reflection on our current conditions where "live” is relegated behind the screen; “latency” becomes a space for emergence, and absence an echo…

How does the algorithmic contour the lyrical? Nearly a century ago, William Carlos Williams declared, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words.” As artificial intelligence becomes a writing tool, his words take on a new resonance. Some critics of algorithmic literature decry the incursion of automation into this essentially human creative practice. Yet there is a long history of literature composed by, with, and for machines, from Ramon Llull’s combinatorial mysticism in the 13th century to Pāṇini’s pioneering work in generative grammar to the avant-garde poetry of Dada and OuLiPo. With an eye on this history, and one on the future, this panel examines the intersection of code with literary language, the computational remaking of one our earliest mnemonic technologies, and the algorithmic resurrection of style.  

Separate, individual ticket is required for this limited seat experience. Register now!

Our landscape is shifting, the threshold between our physical and virtual world is widening into a space unto itself. The experiential existence between our screens has transformed from peripheral to necessary as a result of the pandemic. The urgency to augment this digital landscape with the intentions of saving our humanity has never been more critical. This interactive experience will survey this expanding interfacial space, and through participatory collaboration, generate real-time digital work that will serve as a catalyst for discourse. The works created will live beyond the event and transcend singular authorship, ultimately augmenting this moment in virtual time and space, with the narrative of our humanity.

Physical space closures due to COVID have led to a renewed interest for artists working in virtual spaces and worldbuilding. This panel presents artists and curators exploring the possibilities of online exhibitions to create intimate connections, explore adjacent presents, and go beyond physical reality in their visions.

Last summer in Berlin, in an old swimming pool that had been converted into a theater, GOLEM received its world premiere. The immersive project that fuses dance, technology and music is a collaboration between San Francisco-based synthesizer expert and vocalist Arushi Jain and director and choreographer Carly Lave. The duo met at university as undergraduates and used their respective skills to blur the lines between human and machine, posing questions that explore the place of body and gender in a rapidly-evolving world.

Arushi Jain grew up in Delhi and studied Hindustani classical music at the Prayag Sangeet Samiti School and the Ravi Shankar Institute via the Mozart Choir of India. Later, she relocated to the USA to study Computer Science at Stanford University, where she developed an interest in computer-generated sounds and modular synthesis. It was this background - a deep and developed expertise in traditional and modern techniques - that led to her acclaimed debut album "With & Without", released last fall under the ose | ओस moniker. The album, released on Jain's own GHUNGHRU imprint, was described by Jain as "a strange twisted 21st century interpretation of an ancient artistic practice," and interprets the ragas she grew up singing in a completely new way, using modular synthesis as well as vocals.

American choreographer and dancer Carly Lave moved to Berlin in 2018 as a Fulbright Fellow to develop dance with motion capture technology and virtual reality. Most recently and in continuation of the work on GOLEM, she has partnered with the Goethe Institute to develop an international dance workshop series called "Golem Labor", using new technology to shine a spotlight on dance's innate connection with humanity.

GOLEM is a collaboration between Arushi Jain, Carly Lave, gamelab.berlin, University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern | Virtual Design and Will Hamilton. Here the team's expertise is combined, taking the idea of the golem from Jewish folklore - a creature formed of clay that was created to assist humanity that ended up turning against its creators - and giving it a decidedly modern twist. With sound design from Jain and a score the duo worked on together, the performance uses virtual reality headsets and motion-capture sensors to show how humans and machines can interact - and dance - together seamlessly. As the role of technology in our lives continues to change in an era where so many of us are locked away from physical interaction, GOLEM's questions have become even more vital and pressing.

Editorial: John Twells

The music industry was transformed drastically over the past couple of decades. For better or worse, these developments are tied to technological advancements and a rapidly adapting consumer behavior. Tech companies are invested in a future where AI forms an indispensable part of the creative process. Recent breakthroughs are already paving the way for music that is entirely created and performed by algorithms. But does that make AI an artist? This panel of experts will explore the blurry line separating the artist from the machine and discuss questions of authorship, human and artificial creativity, while also comparing different philosophical and creative approaches in Europe and the US. 

This session poses the question, "What is your vision for a resilient future?" Participants will be asked to travel to a time and place in the future and send a postcard to themselves or a loved one. What will a postcard in the future be like? We will focus on the convergence of art and technology, utilizing virtual platforms as tools for collaboration and engagement. The first engagement will demonstrate how to create and use virtual and augmented reality applications. The second engagement will focus on sharing the postcard interfaces of each participant and having reflective conversations.

You can see postcards from this experience at: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_klu2rBw=/
The Mozilla Hubs virtual gallery of postcards: https://hubs.mozilla.com/cFRQvrs/postcards-from-the-future-virtual-gallery
Instructions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zAl2YGJeiz6FhXQ17xhIG4ghp14af1s9aErThqmMEac/edit?usp=sharing

Universal Basic Income has received renewed attention as a means to increase economic mobility and equity. Its realization would have significant impact for artists -- shifting the asymmetric conditions for participation in the ‘arts industry’ and providing stability for the precarity of art workers around the world. How can UBI models be a tool to open up new subjective spaces as alternative to entrepreneurial individualism, focused instead on commons and care?
The event is edition #3 of the monthly event series NODES - Art + Tech Encounters.

This video documents the strategic working session, "Virtual Stages and Performance Platforms," co-presented by EUNIC DC and CODAME Art + Tech. The session gathered leaders and innovators in the performing arts and virtual platforms to explore new formats for digital programming. Partnerships and experimentation continue to create and expand knowledge of the directions in which we could continue taking virtual programming. Documenting session outcomes and charting a path forward for an uncertain, but increasingly virtual, creative future, this video envisions what we might need to make digital cultural programming curatorially coherent, innovative and exploratory, high quality, and interesting for an audience in front of a screen.

Tatiana Vaughan grew up in Nicaragua where she was inspired by her surroundings to develop a passion for the music that surrounded her. Now based in San Francisco, Vaughan is a respected up-and-coming DJ and producer, informed by a desire to trail her listeners beyond their expectations and deep into the sonic abyss. In her own words, she is driven by an "obsession with the unknown" that has pressed her to elevate her skills as a selector, dragging her through sounds as diverse as industrial, techno, post-punk, darkwave, acid and electro. In the last few years, she has performed extensively in San Francisco and put together podcasts for Mutant Radio, Black Lodge LA and Squirrels on Radio.

Motion Designer and artist Sophie Baker has a background in fine art, which she developed far beyond the canvas, turning to video and animation to realize her creative vision. She now imagines surreal, evolving landscapes with abstract textures using specialist animation software to create immersive visual environments that have become a fixture in San Francisco's electronic music scene in the last couple of years. Baker notably performed at MUTEK SF last year alongside local artist Sepehr, offering her colorful alien landscapes to his acclaimed electro experiments, and has also performed alongside Chris Cruse, DJ Seinfeld, Maya Jane Coles and many others.

Vaughan and Baker will be performing together for the first time here, allowing each other's respective skills to inform a project that will straddle the sound and visual realms. Their collaboration promises to showcase the next generation of San Francisco's local talent.

Editorial: John Twells