RIXC FESTIVAL 2020, THE 5TH OPEN FIELDS CONFERENCE AND ECODATA EXHIBITION
Tiziano DERME. Autonomous Landscapes – Biosensing and the New Wilderness
What are the implications and opportunities in decision making when landscapes are shaped by Ai strategies and machines? How do we frame the environment into a completely new spectrum of relationships and human interference? What does the environment need to perform? Multiple intelligences are currently acting out and changing our perception of the natural world and generally how we refer to environments. If we consider historically to environmental sciences, ecology, we refer to obsolete models (gathering information, data analysis, design, building, maintenance) that generated concepts and concerns such as remediation, regeneration, human safety. Those are the symptoms of the optimized gaze of science trying to extract from the environment fundamental truths, and the making the natural world “how it should be”. We may probably start to look at the environment as a point of departure to encompass and promote other agencies, de-optimizing the way we look at the world, de-construct the false belief of precision and control towards new forms of intelligence and autonomy. How can we confront a more intricate system of interactions? We should start to engage with new moves, rules that need to simultaneously hold machine intelligence and our capability to set goals. How and who is setting them? We should try to describe the ubiquitous reality of computing not just to the introduction of information media into surfaces but also by how it nurtures what is already there. Practically, extend its obliquity into the material substrate of things through biochemical heterogeneity, nested diversity, transversal contamination, symbiosis, and transmission. The design must consider very different regulatory boundaries that enforce existing differences through integration and translation. In other words, Design should be informed by the ethics of ecological information that augment the capacities of exposed surfaces, entire organisms, or the relationship between them into a far-from-command and control state.
Tiziano Derme is an Architect, Media Artists interested in the relationship between Ecology, robotics, and performativity. Currently, he is a researcher at the University of Applied Arts Vienna – Angewandte and Assistant Professor at the University of Innsbruck,
Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Innsbruck focusing on Bio-fabrication and responsive materials. Tiziano is the Director of Co-Founder of MAEID-Büro für Architektur und transmediale Kunst and interdisciplinary practice based in Vienna. Tiziano’s work is a seamless interaction between multimedia interfaces, biomaterials, “living systems” and machines. In 2019, Tiziano was selected as an emergent media artist by Creative Europe EMAPEMARE program and previously had the opportunity
to teach in several international graduates and post-graduate programs, including at the University of Melbourne and the University of Tokyo. His work has received multiple grants and has been exhibited at various events, institutions, and galleries, including Ars Electronica Linz, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Kyriaki GONI. Data Garden. Investigating Data Storage In The DNA Of Plants Through An Art Installation
Can anyone think of the future of connectivity beyond surveillance, minimizing the consequences of technological infrastructures on the natural environment? Is it possible for the bond between human and non-human worlds to be substituted? Can plants, as organisms on which life itself is depended, contribute to the creation and adoption of new practices for the mediated reality? Data Garden investigates these questions by recounting a fictitious narrative that contains elements of truth. The starting point Data Garden is the recent scientific research on the data storage capacity of the living organisms’ genetic material, as well as on the challenges and moral dilemmas concurrently posed. The artist invites the audience to envision a network of plants on the Acropolis rock, in which digital information is circulated and stored. The network is protected by a community of users who in this way maintain the self-disposal of their data. As the storage space transitions from the “cloud” to the earth, and as control passes from the companies to the users, the life circle of data follows that of a plant, fostering a relationship of interdependence and care. In a peculiar garden, users become the plants’ gardeners, whereas plants in their turn become gardeners of the stored information.
Kyriaki Goni is an Athens born and based artist. Working across disciplines and technologies, she creates expanded, multi-layered installations. She connects the ‘local’ with the ‘global’ by critically touching upon questions of datafication, surveillance, distributed networks and infrastructures, ecosystems, human and other than human relations. She presents work in solo (Aksioma, Drugo More, Onassis Foundation) and groups exhibitions (Transmediale, Istandbul Design Biennial, Glass Room, Melbourne Triennial etc). She is a Delfina Foundation alumna (2019) and a Niarchos Artworks fellow (2018).
She writes (Leonardo MIT; 49:4, Neural #65 etc.) and teaches frequently as part of her practice. With prior graduate studies in Fine Arts, Goni also holds an MA in Digital Arts (Athens School of Fine Arts) and both a BA and MSc in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Panteion & Leiden University).
Raivo KELOMEES. Redesigning Paleolithic Forms: From Imagination to Tangible Reality
The talk is based on my exhibition project which was based on digitally produced paleolithic forms. Three exhibitions were produced: “Estonian Preform” (2012), “Fossil” (2015) and “Fossil and Clone” (2018).
Main question and task was to convert imaginative forms to tangible reality using digital technology.
I had some general questions: what would be the most ancient form and shape you can imagine connected to Estonia? If we try to imagine the country without 5000 years of cultural and historical influences, what would be the most primary reality, what we can bring as an example for visual thinking? What would visual art look like without cultural influences? What is the past before the past?
Some questions were more specific: how to achieve consistency in the exhibition space? Is it possible to include into the context of the exhibition the reflection and critics of the same exhibition? Does the digital manipulation of materiality produce new knowledge?
In the center of the exhibition was a form which is designed by myself being inspired by fossils — trilobites — you can find in the North-East of Estonia. There were drawings, 3D animation and documentation of the production of the form and interviews with professional critics. Nonexistent reality becomes an object for artistic meditation.
The project was an artistic research project of a symbiosis between paleolithic biological form, surreal imagination and digital technology.
The project website:
http://www.kelomees.net/estform.html
Raivo Kelomees, PhD (art history), artist, critic and new media researcher. Presently working as senior researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn. He studied psychology, art history, and design at Tartu University and the Academy of Arts in Tallinn. He has published articles in the main Estonian cultural and art magazines and newspapers since 1985. His works include the book “Surrealism” (Kunst Publishers, 1993) and an article collection “Screen as a Membrane” (Tartu Art College proceedings, 2007), “Social Games in Art Space” (EAA, 2013). His Doctoral thesis was “Postmateriality in Art. Indeterministic Art Practices and Non-Material Art” (Dissertationes Academiae Artium Estoniae 3, 2009).
In recent years he has been participating in conferences dedicated to new media, digital humanities, theatre and visual art in São Paulo, Manizales, Plymouth, Krems, Riga, Shanghai, Göteborg, Hong Kong, Dubai and other places.
Website: www.kelomees.net
Vincenzo Sansone. The use of digital technologies in theatre performances and installations to put the viewer in contact with nature
The notion of “green” has become omnipresent, often used in a superficial and didactic way. We can talk about the issue of nature, without making it explicit but by virtually transporting the spectator inside nature. Several artists, in performances and installations, have done just that using digital technologies. Apparati Effimeri (Italy) links video projection mapping with a study on nature, through references such as Pliny the Elder. In their scenographies (Parsifal) and installations (Naturalis Historia), they digitally recreate the effects of atmospheric agents on plant-elements, immersing the spectators in these panoramas. Miguel Chevalier (France) examines the link between nature and artifice, creating generative virtual plant-releated universes in which the elements appear, grow, die in interactive digital gardens, modified by visitors, through sensors (Trans-Natures). Teatro Potlach (Italy), in its site-specific performance Città Invisibili brings the river Tiber-Farfa to a village through digital technologies and theatre tales, immersing the spectator inside the installation, surrounded by digital water, as if he were in a nature reserve. These examples show how to raise awareness on the theme of nature without didactically proposing it. The analysis of some case studies will allow to understand this narrative possibility enabled by digital technologies, theatre and installations encounter.
Vincenzo Sansone, master’s degree in Digital Performance at Sapienza University of Rome, holds a PhD in European Cultural Studies from the University of Palermo. He was a Visiting Scholar at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and the Polytechnic University of Valencia, researching video projection mapping and its relationship with the performing arts. The focus of his research concerns these areas: theatre, dance, set design, new media, animation, AR technologies, and software culture. Since 2015, he has been working with Teatro Potlach (Rome) as an actor and digital set designer. In 2020 he teaches Video-Theatre Production Tecniques at Brera academy of fine arts (Milan) and he teaches in the digital scenographies workshop at the university of Milan La Statale