New Media Conference Report 2014

FOR PROFESSIONALS

NEW MEDIA CONFERENCE REPORT 2014

Exploding Young Media

So many interesting guests. So much valuable knowledge. And then they leave again. Paulien Dresscher, curator of Cinekid’s renowned New Media Lab came up with the solution to harness the knowledge and enthusiasm of the people behind the projects. ‘To be able to share that knowledge we created a conference about the projects in the Media Lab, to see if we can gear up some kind of a network with people who are interested in new media arts for younger audiences. You are part of that very first meeting. We called it: exploding young media.’

How do new creative technologies contribute to artistic research and tools in the context of a young audience? How can they spur interest in research, how is that meaningful for makers and users and how do artists play with these new technologies? Cinekid has always seen new media technology as an integral part of visual culture, said critic and curator Nat Muller. ‘Not only in context of looking and experiencing things but also from the level of production. Keep that in mind today: wow can children produce work themselves?’

Zachary Lieberman and Molmol KuoMore Poetry, Less Demo

That title is the motto of the artist run School for Poetic Computation in New York that was founded in 2013. Celebrating failure and collaboration, reads the school’s website, it is a school in the sense that there is a lot of learning and teaching happening in a physical space. It is also a residency for creative practitioners in art and technology to develop their ideas into projects and publish them through documentation and exhibition.

A horizontal pedagogy, says artist/hacker and cofounder Zachary Lieberman. That was one of the motives behind the project. Not an official institution like Parsons New School for Design, where Lieberman has been teaching for years, but, as artist Molmol Kuo put it, “a means to translate the things we love and care about into pedagogy.”

To most people technology is a matter of newer, faster, better and especially a matter of sales. But the school look at it differently. It wants to explore the creative and expressive nature of computational approaches to art and design. A lot of what is happening there is self-directed. The students are driving the curriculum through a lot of hands-on stuff. The school wants to celebrate the small thing, the small gesture: looking at computation and writing code as a poetic gesture.

Lieberman calls himself an artist, a researcher and a hacker, dedicated to explore new modes of expression research and play. He is also one of the founders of Open Frameworks, a c++ library for creative coding. Kuo makes interactive installations – ‘I like to do weird things with electricity’ – and focuses on building sculptures and interactive objects through which she tells stories.

To encourage people to drink more water, Michelle Obama’s charity Partnership for a Healthier America commissioned the interactive collective Yes Yes No, of which Liebermann and Kuo

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are a part, to make an object that explores the relation between health and water drinking. “So we build this chatty water fountain that talks to you when your lips touch the water. And it stops when you move away from the water. We captured their real-time reactions with a camera.”

Another project is the talking shoe, commissioned by Google. “This is super boring”, says the shoe when the person stops walking. Or when he get’s up: “That’s more like it.” Why? They wanted to create a ridiculous object, said Kuo.

Other projects comprised entire landscapes. Kuo: “We were invited by the London 2012 Olympics to make a project with Hadrian’s Wall, the old border between the Roman Empire and the and the rest of the British Isles. The wall doesn’t exist anymore. It’s more like an idea. So we thought of something that inverts the idea of separating people: the wall that connects people. We did that through light: 400 balloons across the landscape that light up and the audience can send messages that get transmitted and translated along the wall. It was a two day performance.”

“The point is how to make tomorrow better than today through joy and magic. Through our projects we want to make connections to people and bring joy. Make somebody smile tomorrow.” Lieberman: “ we’re looking for the open-mouth phenomenon. The open mouth is the pathway into someone’s heart.”



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Golan Levin and Chris SugrueOpen Frameworks and Developing open source‘The add-ons are like guns. But good guns!’

Fifteen years ago the instruments to create new media art were made by engineers. They were terrible to work with. Then artists started building toolkits themselves.

Their work is really built on the shoulders of others, says Golan Levin. “We work with open source tools like Arduino, Processing, Open frameworks and Cinder. Those are cross platform arts engineering toolkits. Through those instruments many people have produced tools with which artists can work. In the life cycle of a project a student might download and produce the project and share the code back to the community so other people can learn how he made his project. There is an enormous library of extensions. It’s like a Swiss army knife. Or the stock room with guns from The Matrix movie, where Keanu Reeves says he need guns. Lots of guns. And they appear from nowhere. So these are our guns. But good guns. It’s a way for artists and pranksters working together to allow people to adapt the media and take back the culture.”

For bring the projects to life constantly changing networks of collaborators are created. Sometimes a project is build in a temporary makeshift laboratory. But often it means working at a distance with other artists.

What exactly are they interested in? Levin explores the expressive usages of computation by designing artefacts, interactive installations through performances and virtual environments. He’s interested in applying creative twists to technology. Not only concerning the relationship between human and machine but also the relationships of humans amongst each other. Chris Sugrue is a programmer who’s interested in interactive installations, audio-visual performances and experimental interfaces. In her work she explores technology in a playful way. Interests include artificial intelligence, optical illusions and eye tracking.



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An example of one of Sugrue’s projects in Delicate Boundaries, an interactive installation that imagines that the worlds inside digital devices can move into the physical world. Small bugs made of light crawl out of a computer screen onto the human bodies that make contact with them, surprising the audience as they try to abandon a virtual existence. http://csugrue.com/delicateboundaries/

In 2011 Levin together with Kyle McDonald created Eyeshine, an interactive installation that captures, records and replays the retro-reflections (red-eye effects) from the eyes of its observers. In doing so it presents an image wholly constructed through the process of being observed. http://www.flong.com/projects/eyeshine/

Now for the first time Levin and Sugrue work together on a project commissioned by Cinekid. It’s based on the negative space around the hands. That in turn is based on the notion of defamiliarization: experiencing your own body in a new way, by exploiting the ways the body could come to have a mind of its own. For instance, looking through Plexiglas your hand gets an extra finger and you can see animations projected around the hand. The add-ons used in the project are made by dozens of people, stresses Levin, sometimes dating all the way back to a research article published in a journal at the end of the nineties. This is how open source works.

Lab 212 designing for childrenCyril Diagne and Beatrice Lartigue‘In a humble way we try to evoke a feeling’

Lab 212 is a Paris based collective of ten graphic designers, woodcarver, programmers and other craftspeople, that puts the user at the centre of their work.

The architect Le Corbusier, says Beatrice Lartigue, used the human body to design all his work. Lad 212’s approach is based on the same principle of user centred design. “That means doing a lot of prototypes and tests and experiments. Which is very inspiring in itself. Share and discuss a lot and by talking about it other ideas emerge. It’s very interesting work process and social experience. We also work with open frameworks. It saves us a lot of time.”

Lab 212 created the prizewinning project Les métamorphoses de Mr. Kalia: an interactive poetic adventure and a study of the concept of metamorphosis, the natural capacity of animals to abruptly change their body structure. To explore this topic, Lab 212 invited the audience to personify Mr. Kalia as he goes through many surrealistic metamorphoses. http://www.lab212.org/projects/les-metamorphoses-de-mr-kalia

For 2-4 year olds Lab 212 and Stereolux created the Bain de midi project, a journey of discovery, sensory, interactive, where the children can take the parents by the hand. It mixes the wind of the sea with family vacation photos and lets them play with wind and images. http://baindemidi.lab212.org/



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http://csugrue.com/delicateboundaries/

http://www.flong.com/projects/eyeshine/

http://baindemidi.lab212.org/

The lab works a lot with iteration, in which users are brought in and the concept is improved based on their feedback. First we try to imagine the audience. After that it’s a lot of trial and error until there is a first prototype. Multimedia is not always part of the projects. It really has to add an extra dimension, says Lartigue. Sometimes tangible objects work much better. Learning through playing is a key element in the company’s philosophy. “In a humble way we try to evoke a feeling or an idea with an installation. We are not educators.”

Anna Dumitriu & Kevin ColeTrust me, I’m an artist: on art and science collaborationThe Super-organism from the black lagoon

We can’t see them but we’re scared of them anyway. And not without reason. But that didn’t stop artist Anna Dumitriu and biomedical scientist Kevin Cole to start building interactive projects around them and use bacteria as a medium. Sounds weird? It is. ‘We’re doing probably what can only be described as a completely insane thing here.’

Dumitriu is an artist and her work blurs the boundaries between art and science. Founder and director of The Institute of Unnecessary Research and known for her new book Trust me I’m an artist: towards an ethics of art and science collaboration. The project comprises a series of public events, taking place in international settings, investigating new ethical issues arising from art and science collaboration and considering the roles and responsibilities of the artists, scientists and institutions involved. Kevin Cole is a biomedical scientist, doing “really complicated things with gene sequencing”.

They were at Cinekid with a project called Super-organism, a kind of virtual petri dish. If you would touch the screen the bacteria from your skin appeared on the screen. “Actually, they’re not real bacteria”, said Dumitriu. “We modelled how the bacteria behaved. In real life it takes about three days to grow. Here about ten seconds because the attention span of children is short. So we did adjust the growth process. They have to stand still for a minute and maybe that’s a good thing: slowing the children down for a minute. We also made time-lapse movies of the bacterial colonies growing. It’s sort of Do It Yourself biology. You can even create patterns by using chemicals to stop the bacteria from growing in certain places. It gives people a chance to play with hands-on microbiology and sit down and talk to people like Kevin. Moreover it works for all ages, even tough it’s weird. We’re doing probably what can only be described as a completely insane thing here.”

The project is part of a larger campaign to get people more acquainted with the biomedical sciences and the risks but also the prejudices involved in disease and bacteria. Cole is part of a research group called Modernizing Medical Microbiology, which is lead by Public Health England and Oxford University. “We’re looking at using genome sequencing in microbiology. We look at the entire DNA sequence of a bacterium and use this to get a really good understanding of what makes the organism ticks and how it works. We look at genes that cause antibiotic resistance and we can also look for the exact mode of transmission to map how a bacteria moves around within a population.” This produces gigasets of data and this in turn created unexpected changes, explained Cole. “There’s been a big shift in science. It used to be more secretive and closed doors. Now it’s becoming very open source with the sharing of data sets



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across the world. We can globally map how one isolate moves from one country to another.” And this, said Dumitriu, among many other things creates weird privacy issues. “You can look at the bacteria and see which groups of people were together.”



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New Media Conference Report 2014

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