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SNLab develops projects with academia, public institutions and private industry in order to generate efficient networks that optimize interdisciplinary and creative approaches to innovation. New media, the intersections between fine arts, science and technology, regeneration projects, environmental and sustainability issues, secular society and virtual reality environments are some of the areas explored. SNLab works on the conception and development of creative content for exhibitions and media projects, collaborative synergies and the management of interdisciplinary networks.

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arts and computing - cs450 web page

This year I was at ISEA2009 and the presentation focused on the process of ‘normalization of the cyborg’.

THE NORMALIZATION OF THE CYBORG: FROM FUTURISTIC ARTISTIC EXPRESSION OF MUTILATION TO DAILY AESTHETIC BEAUTY

The concept of mutilation as a permanent scarring of the integrity of the body has been overcome by the representation in visual culture of the cyborg, the bionic human and the genetically and bionically engineered mutant. Mutants with bionic prosthetics in the X-Men film trilogy, the bionic man in The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) and his companion The Bionic Woman (1976) as well as The Terminator (1984) with its sequels have contributed to create a new aesthetic perception of the artificial.

From the Cyborg Manifesto to theories of Post-humanism and Trans-humanism, the arts have embraced the opportunity of realizing the conjunction between human and machine envisaged at first by Tommaso Marinetti in the Futurist Manifesto. Stelarc has contributed with his performances and body implants to explore new aesthetic forms that conceive the prosthesis as an evolutionary empowering design.

If in the arts this approach has created aesthetic debates and polarizations between bioconservatism and technoprogressivism, how is the reality of mutilation approached by people in their daily lives?

The paper analyzes whether the aesthetic perception of prosthetics is that of a permanent sign of mutilation or that of a new technological empowerment.

“In the last two to three years many men have asked to have prosthetics without coverage, leaving the metal part visible. They tell me that a leg like this is more futuristic! Maybe they feel more masculine because the metallic leg gives them the sensation of being bionic, half human and half machine. Men under fifty especially request it. At the opposite end of the spectrum, women ask for symmetric prosthetics very similar to the one they lost.” Interview with Dr. X at the Limb Fitting Centre, London.

If the visual arts have created an experience and imagination of post-humanity as the futuristic merging of human and machine that the public perceives as increasingly achievable, what are the new frontiers of aesthetic exploration?

Are the aesthetics of post-humanity becoming those of a ‘normalization’ of cyborgology? The paper will argue that the contemporary aesthetics of futuristic empowerment look to artists and designers in order to deliver new modes of aesthetic consumption for a technology no longer perceived as reconstruction of a mutilation but as the empowering necessary framework to facilitate the transition from human to super-human.

I am getting ready to leave for Stockholm for the Norlit conference ‘Codex and Code: Aesthetics, Language and Politics in an Age of Digital Media.

The paper I am presenting is titled TEXT AND DIGITAL MEDIA: THE VISUALIZATION OF CODE, CODEX AND CONTEXT.

The changes in the definition of text and image provoked by contemporary digital media have altered the traditional concepts of political and social hierarchies as well as blurred the boundaries between text based and image based disciplines. The concepts of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity as well as those of transnationalism and multiculturalism offer insight into the relationships that have developed between disciplines within both global and local contexts. These relationships are framed within a digital media structure based on processes of mediation, remediation and transmediation that reflect the digital transformations that have blurred the boundaries between classic and new media (Lev Manovich; Henry Jenkins).

In this context literary works are no longer part of a standalone discipline but can be visually represented in multiple visual formats, both digital and analogue. The text itself with its context, real and/or virtual, becomes a visual structure that can be manipulated and engaged with beyond its original purpose.

The paper will focus on demonstrating, through a visual artwork titled Help Me To Be Friends With Her, how the richness of contemporary digital media offers the opportunity to create images from literary texts that, having originated as written word, are transformed into digital artworks that can be transferred into analogue formats.

The paper will conclude by demonstrating the relevance and vitality of literature within the contemporary digital hybridization processes which display words, as both textual and visual artworks, as well as stress the ruptures in the socio-political hierarchies that these unorthodox practices generate.
 

I am catching up with all the things that have happened during the semester. One of the most pleasant events was this conference in Carrara sponsored by La Scuola di Nuove Tecnologie dell’Arte dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, Il centro studi UCAN and Neural Magazine.

I had the possibility of discussing issues related to the preservation of digital media. It was a really good meeting and I hope to meet again both Tommaso Tozzi and Alessandro Ludovico. Check the magazine out (http://www.neural.it/).
 

I was in Glasgow for the Screen Studies Conference 2009 and its 50th anniversary. Had a blast of a time and of course met old friends and made new ones. (http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/screen/conference2009/) I chaired a really good session with two young academics; their names are Roya Rastegar who presented "New Frontiers off the Screen: Physical Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival" and Ariel Rogers with a paper titled "From Immersion to Connection: Digital Cinematic Experience in Light of Widescreen." The session titled AFTER CINEMA: Digital Screens was chaired by Aylish Wood. The panel was very well matched and my thanks go to Aylish Wood, Suzanne Buchan with "Theorizing Animation as the Manipulated Moving Image," and Dale Hudson with "Mobile Screens, Global Networks, Digital Structures and Politicizing ‘Film’". The title of my own paper and the abstract are below. UBIQUITOUS DIGITAL SCREENS: IMAGES ACROSS MEDIA FROM MOBILE PHONES TO GIANT SCREENS The paper will address issues of image reproducibility in new media and the de-evaluation of content re-presented across multiple screens. Is the continuous process of image reproducibility in new media and the de-evaluation of content re-presented across multiple screens producing more than a ‘witness/documentary’ society? Is the ubiquity of the image the cause underpinning a process of homogenization and commodification of content increasingly devoid of meaning, as Jean Baudrillard describes it? Are multiple screens altering forms of behavioral interactions, creating a metastructure able to enforce social homogenized behavioral responses? The desire to engage with multiple screens at any time and in any space does not necessarily reflect a deeper engagement either with content or with its mediated re-presentation across media. Remediation and transmediation, across multiple screens, provide the opportunity for a deeper participatory engagement although, as Paul Virilio states, these engagements can be characterized by instantaneity and ephemerality. Screens as multiple representations become nothing more than a tool to simulate an interactive experience that is void of meaning. The question raised by both Baudrillard and Virilio is if there is a value in contemporary images represented across multiple screens that provide the impression of an egalitarian democracy of participation. The paper will conclude by analyzing the opportunities and challenges that multiple screens offer for behavioral interactions when representing images that reduce social interactions to simulated reproductions of void. I was traveling between three conference in the past week and finally had some time to catch up with my blog and updates. I am in Istanbul now, 36 degrees celtius, and listening/watching CNN on TV while writing this post. My father always wondered how I could multitask - I have an unorthodox answer to that... Had a great time at the conference on the futurists although not too much time to spend with old and new friends. The conference details are available on: (http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/french/Futurism_conference.htm) DIGITAL AVANT-GARDE: PHYSICAL FREEDOM THROUGH TECHNOLOGY AS THE FUTURISTS’ CULTURAL INHERITANCE? The Futurists altered the perception of the relationship between the body and the machine. No longer competitive entities, the body and the machine are merging elements that converge in new structures. The borders of the Avant-garde are those of a new entity, neither human nor machine, that embodies the frontiers of contemporary digital art. The human body - by moving into new frameworks that allow the transpositions of the biological into the digital - has become a threshold to be superseded. Marinetti’s ideals and vision of a closer merging of the human and the machine is the basis upon which contemporary constructs of future visions, post-humanity, cyborgology, post-modernity, deconstructivism and human digitizations are shaped. The concept of embodiment, presence, digital transformations and representations of visual cues and behaviors in Virtual Reality Environments and Second Life offer to the artists and scientists alike new futuristic territories to conquer. The digital avant-garde is at work in order to transfer the emotions, the anima of the body, into the light speed of electricity, making mankind, or what is left of it, ubiquitous, omnipresent and forever young. The futurist’s debate on the role that art, science, technology, ethics, transformation of the body and transformation of the soul play in defining the concept of humanity and freedom has carried on from the 20th century into the 21st century. The digital conversion of biofeedback data in the visual representation of thoughts and dreams is one of the steps that is leading to the digital visualization of the brain’s processing mechanism. The mind - increasingly disjointed by the body in forms of digital visualizations that as in the Matrix trilogy by Andy and Larry Wachowski are not linked to a functional existence in real space - is its own newly empowered machine which, with the speed of light, creates new spaces of artistic and social engagements. The paper will conclude by arguing the role that futurism still plays in the contemporary digital avant-garde by shaping the artistic visions of a utopian and dystopian future where both the love and dread of the machine and of the digital coexist. The discussion on Yasmin (http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin/) about the Ethnic Cyborg has started. I am there as a respondent and this was my first emailed contribution to the list on July 1, 2009. I find the definition of 'ethnic cyborg' problematic. Reasons for my position are related to the basic nature of the cyborg, as envisaged by Donna Haraway. The new nature of the cyborg should have been that of revolutionizing the status quo, overcoming differences, surpassing and moving beyond human differences and even beyond human nature. The proposition of the cyborg as ethnically distinct has for me a very dangerous connotation, which is that of promoting a future power struggle based on augmented and non-augmented beings, racist interpretations of ethnicity (augmented-humans vs non-augmented-humans) and a constant quest for a bio-mechanical superiority. What I personally feel is that there is a generalized institutional attempt to conquer 'new' territories - the cyborg as well as that of the world wide web - and subjugate them by replicating old frameworks. This happens by imposing structures and divisions along the lines of already existing hierarchies in the realm of the real. The ethnic and consequentially national definition of the cyborg may just represent its ideological fall. In this context the cyborg, the Centaur of the futurists, has already failed in providing an alternative to the social hierarchies that according to Haraway should be altered and revolutionized. The cyborg is presenting us with an old framework just transferred and transposed in a different realm, that of the cybernetic organism. After having watched and listened to the press conference by President Barak Obama and reports on The Huffington Post on the situation in Iran I was left wondering: is Facebook and the digital world in general really helping? The question I guess should be better rephrased: what is the digital world really helping with? Are social networks assisting in changing the reality of the situation on the ground? The situation in Iran in these days, with its cultural complications and political games, is not what I would like to focus on. What I am interested in is the equation that is culturally established between the importance and usefulness of disseminating information speedily with that of helping and assisting civilians in distress on the other side of the globe. There is an increasingly bad feeling of déjà vu as the images from Iran unfold. Everything reminds me of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing to which I assisted and bared witness from the TV screen in Italy. More recently are the repressions in Tibet, I watched those from my computer screen in London, and in Burma, from my computer screen and iphone in Istanbul. I increasingly do not believe that the blogosphere creation of an instantaneous news cycle is helping in the short term. A different issue is the long term validity of documentation of these atrocities. The political and material pressures that can be exercised upon undemocratic and non-participatory regimes are limited. There is little that can be done in the immediate, but also on the long run, what I feel is left is a documentation of an event, that is becoming more and more accurate, that can be instantaneously disseminated across the world, that can outrage and incense, but that does very little to assist those who are suffering and bearing the brunt of a repression. From the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 to today arguably is business as usual: the Chinese establishment has not suffered and the public outrage has vanished. Yet we keep on bearing witness to those events while we buy products that are manufactured in China. The Burmese junta of dictators has not collapsed and they are still enjoying the same privileges and control. The social networks appear to have created a new media circus of information that is functional and pandering to the West concepts of democratic freedoms while leaving those in distress on the ground to die. Perhaps there is no democratic change without strife, struggle and self sacrifice and the ideal world that one would imagine of powerful new media and social platforms shatters against the reality of what we can and cannot do. Perhaps bearing witness is all we can do. And remembering - at the shelves of a store or at an oil pump, or when buying Nokia and Siemens’ products that are built with censoring devices and are sold to dictatorial regimes to crush freedom of expression and human rights – ten days or ten years from now, that may be a bit too much to ask.

The guest of honor of Kurye International Video Festival will be the world renowned Cypriot/Australian performance artist Stelarc, who produces works using medical monitoring systems, prosthetics, genetic science, robotics and virtual reality. Setting out to examine the limits of the human body and gaining renown with his works that bring together the human body and art with technology and medicine, Stelarc will offer the keynote speech on June 5, 2009.

The event will be followed on June 6 by a conference titled “Body and Technology” that will take place in santralistanbul with the attendance of famous culture and media theorist Garry Hall and media artist, designer and software developer Kirk Woolford. Closing the conference on June 6 a round table discussion titled “Body, Technology and Art” will see the participation of Stelarc, scholar and critic Tuna Erdem and scholar and artist Lanfranco Aceti.
Kurye International Video Festival will last 11 days and will take place at Akbank Sanat, Bilgi University Bilgi Universitesi Santral Kampus and Talimhane Theater.

Festival Program:
Akbank Sanat Opening Screening and Cocktail: June 2, 2009, 17:00
Akbank Sanat Video Screenings: June 3/4/5/9/10/11/12, 12:00- 19:30
Istanbul Bilgi University Santral Campus Video Screenings: June 6-12, 2009, 12:00-18:00, E1 Building – Room 306
Czech Animation Workshops: June 2-4, 2009, 13:00-18:00, E1 Building – Room 306
Stelarc Seminar: June 5, 2009, 19:00, Akbank Sanat
“Body, Technology and Art” Panel: June 6, 2009, 12:00, Bilgi Santral Campus E4 Building – Room 305
Cie Mulleras Performance: June 10, 2009, 20:00, Talimhane Theate

This summer I am going to Cardiff where I will chair a panel on Post-humanity at the Literature, Art and Culture in an Age of Global Risk conference at Cardiff University. I look forward to this because Charlie Gere is going to be there and I have not seen him for quite a while now and it would be great to catch up. He is a great scholar and I have always appreciated his work.

The panel is structured as a sketch of the future visions for Post-humanity. When I was in Manchester for the Futuresonic Festival and Conference, the concepts of geoengineering, presented by Jamais Cascio, and terraforming, a NASA memory from my personal past, came back into the fore. The panel in Cardiff will sketch some ideas on the evolutionary trajectory of the body but also look into the complex matrix of aesthetic cultural perceptions that have developed since the encounter of the Futurists with the machine.

Panel Title: Sketching the Future of Post-humanity

The concept of crisis and transformation is reflected in the aesthetic choices of the visual arts which, like a barometer, signal and identify the shifts within society. The panel will address the theoretical underpinning of these transformation and the modalities of their representations in contemporary art practices focusing on the possible relation between crisis and escapism in Post-humanity.

Paper 1: Curating Post-humanity? Art in Between Utopia and Dystopia
Lanfranco Aceti, Sabanci University, Istanbul

The paper will discuss the vision of a future that has moved from the optimistic approach of the Futurists, in which a technologically based utopic world would represent the panacea to the problems of humanity, to one of a contemporary dystopic vision in which the ‘maimed’ post-human body represent a temporary hybrid response to the cataclysmic events of a humanity in a world in crisis.

The visual representation of the new aestheticized crises, both in film and fine arts, is one that still concentrates on technology as the suitable response. This is a technological response to crises that, in the contemporary dystopic visions, can only ensure a temporary survival, before collapsing humanity in a worse crisis than the one technology originally attempted to solve. Technological solutions are presented as delayed failures that only ensure the final collapse through a technological betrayal of human hopes.

The new technological hybrid-body, in the dystopic vision, is something that needs to be constantly curated as a consequence of humanity’s departure from the perfected image bestowed by the creator – homo est clausura mirabilium dei (man is the closing point of the marvels of the universe) in Paul Virilio, Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, 21.

The paper will conclude by arguing that the curatorial role in presenting these visions of the human body is not one based on utopia or dystopia, nor based on the perfect existence of an original image of the body to which one should adhere or that should be ‘curated’ of its sinful acquired imperfection. The vision of the post-human body is that of an evolutionary process within which failure in a crisis is only but one of many different possible outcomes. 

Paper 2: The Aesthetic Beauty of the Artificial: When Prosthetic Bodies Become an Art Expression of Empowering Design Technologies
Sessa Valentina, Birkbeck College, London

Technology is so predominant in the construction and visions of future modern worlds that the cyborg has become an expression of a technological invasion of the body for its preservation. The oxymoron of a technological transformation of the body for its preservation is reflected in the concept of hyper technology as the only viable escape from the consequences of a human and planetary crisis. 

In the artististic practice of Stelarc, the cyborg is a posthuman technological entity adapted to live and survive in a new space determined by recurrent planetary crises. The human body becomes a site where technology as prosthetics may absolve both the aesthetic as well as functional goals. The merging of technological aesthetics and human body, particularly in the work of Stelarc, appears to realize the Futurists’ vision of a new world inhabited by a machine and human hybrid. 

Based on interviews with patients of the Limb Fitting Centre at the Charing Cross Hospital in London, who really live the condition of having a prosthesis implanted in their body, the paper will investigate the perception of prosthetics as physical reconstruction of the body and aesthetic enactments of Stelarc’s and the Futurists’ aesthetic vision.

The paper will conclude by discussing whether the possibility of a future “merger between human and mechanical,” as carried out by Stelarc in his aesthetic vision, can only be considered an unconventional and unachievable flimsy or if it is a phenomenon that can already be observed in action to overcome the current crises of the body.
 

Paper 3: Human Avatars in Posthumanity: Using Technology To Reach A Peer-to-Peer Mind Sharing in Immersive Reality
Emrah Kavlak, Sabanci University, Istanbul

The paper will present a possible future vision of a transhumanistic technology through which humans would be able to communicate with each other in space by remotely sharing minds via brain signals. Unlike the avatars in metaverses, where the freedom of control and the level of immersion is limited by the computer interface, this is the vision of a person that would have the chance of experiencing someone else’s body and his/her senses in the real world. 

This ideal system would provide an environment with shared perception for a unique peer-to-peer immersive reality and mind sharing experience.

The motivation for the emergence of such technology could be rooted in the crisis of the body and the planet. This crisis could necessitate the use of the human brain as a transferable and sharable medium. The human brain is already ‘installed’ in the human body and its capabilities are advanced with a device able to redistribute knowledge and preserve biological information.
Mind sharing technology would allow in a time of crisis the ubiquitous presence of knowledge and create a common media, that of the brain sharing technology, able to ensure a powerful interface between individuals. The user, as a human who uses his / her own body as an interface, would use the body and its senses as a natural interface allowing an exchange of data with no artificial screens, in-between devices or technological interfaces needed.

The paper will conclude by analyzing if the vision of mind sharing is a possible response to crisis or if it represents a form of technological escapism in an era of dystopia. 

I was speaking at the http://www.socialtechsummit.org/home conference last week and presented a new artwork titled Will Henry Jenkins Hear About It?
Futuresonic was the right platform to engage and meet with a lot of people, but the art event in FaceBook, as it unfolds, creates many questions.
In particular, since a topical area of my investigation is the power relationship and the process of exploitation and enslavement of the web, I wonder if the web has been transformed in a playground within which under the masquerade of social events and civic media lurk hidden monsters. The modalities within which new categories of web platforms create and manipulate collective behaviors are a great source of understanding of the politics of the future. My personal feeling is that the intrusion and exploitation is the smaller tasks which repeated once by millions of people generate ‘quantifiable’ riches.

If eating an idea was the maximum of the revolutionary thought in the 1970s, eating an electronic word, today, may be the real revolution.

7-8 November 2009, İstanbul
Deadline: 1st of August 2009

The first international amberConference will be held in conjunction with the amber’09 Art and Technology Festival on the 7th and 8th of November 2009 in Istanbul, Turkey. The conference aims to create a platform of discussion and dissemination for the various themes and topics in which Science, Art and Technology converge.

The theme for this year’s event is “Cyborg”, a concept that has captured the imagination of the artistic and scientific communities in terms of theoretical, technological and creative outputs.

The conference seeks previously unpublished papers of a maximum of 4500 words within the fields of Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Computer Sciences and Art Papers discussing original artwork.

Topics include (but are not limited to)
• Machinic/Cyborg Art
• Robotics and robotic art
• Cyborg and Performing arts
• Avatars (virtual worlds and virtualenvironments)
• Computer Games
• Wearable and Tactile Technologies
• Artificial intelligence
• Post humanism
• New modes of embodiment
• Agency
• Medicine
• Genetic engineering, biology, clones and hybrids
• Religion, tradition and eternal life
• Militarism
• Gender

Important dates:
A 500 word abstract to be submitted by 1st of August 2009
Notification of acceptance 20th of August 2009
Registration deadline 1st of October 2009
Deadline for full paper (4500 word) submission 1st of November 2009
Conference 7th and 8th of November 2009
Deadline for final revised paper submission 30th of December 2009
Book of proceedings will be published by February 2010
go to amberConference site

The webpage for Portraits of Transculturalism - Istanbul, an international symposium on fine arts and curatorial studies, is now available. The link is: http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/event2/index.html and there is a program available as well as the list of national and international speakers. The event will take place from May 4 to 7 across 4 venues in Istanbul.
Hope everyone will enjoy it.

Saying that there is a need to rethink in evolutionary terms the way in which we think of religions’ moral stands is pretty revolutionary, particularly if one were to think that religions are based on dogmatic assumptions that are very difficult to shift. Tony Blair just did that asking for a more critical ‘rethinking’ of the moral stand of the Catholic Church on its perception of the gay community. Is society changing faster than we would assume?

Newsweek published an interesting article on postchristianity (the choice of the spelling and small caps are intentional). The idea of a revision of the personal and cultural engagement with Christianity or any other religion is a welcome thought. It challenges the concept of revelation on which the truth of religion is based upon and in some instances also the sacrality of art itself.

A strange thought has suddenly dawned upon me, is art just another religious addiction? The great focus of art for centuries on religious representation - even when we talk of the Greek or Roman pantheons that today are only mythological remnants - brings back the idea of an evolutionary, unstable and always changing concept of art as well as religions. Parmenides with the philosophical impossibility of knowing the truth of the gods comes to my mind. Where is then standing the concept of revelation of ‘truth’ - artistic and/or religious - when the social upheavals determine and shape aesthetic and theological changes?

Perhaps a mix of art and religion as a new postmodern engagement should be sought in the religious aesthetic of pleasure, but that perhaps would be still a bit too Epicurean. Still in such a beautiful day the pleasure of life is more appealing to me that of afterlife: vague, inconsistent and not at all certain in its multiple revelations.

Carpe diem then and let’s hope that the gods, and the politicians, will forgive us a moment of pleasure. 

There has been a change in the West. The debate on multiculturalism, with all of its pitfall and misinterpretations, appears to have shifted. Finally religious and national statements that are intolerant of human life, basic human rights and minorities are no longer cultural expressions but ‘abhorrent’ misgivings.

Too little too late? The change is certainly welcome. From the condemnation of the Catholic Church for its statements on condoms to the no less severe condemnation of a ‘rape law’ in Afghanistan, in these days religious and political figures ( Karzai ) that attempt to infringe basic human rights in name of a loosely defined concept of culture are rebuffed and rebuked.

It will take a bit of time before both the political and religious figure will perceive the strong wind of change that are redefining cultural engagements as having to be necessarily based on the respect of human life and dignity independently from sexual, racial and religious identities of the individual.

To define abhorrent these cultural misconceptions that are sold under the banner of national and religious laws is a first step for engagements that are respectful of everyone’s basic human rights.