\\Computing Counterpoint
(2025)
author(s): Francesco Elgorni
published in: KC Research Portal
How can counterpoint be computed?
Instead of looking at counterpoint solely from a historical perspective and reducing it to "music trend of the past", the research contemplates counterpoint as generative technique while exploring its immense yet mechanical creative power through a small selection of case-studies.
Finally, a few thoughts are spent on the meaning of rules in music and the role of the computer in historically informed practice is briefly investigated.
Spotting A Tree From A Pixel (With Remote Sensing Researchers)
(2022)
author(s): Sheung Yiu
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition contemplates the collaboration between me, a photographer, and remote sensing researchers from the Department of Geoinformatics at Aalto University, in an ongoing artistic research collaboration called Ground Truth. Ground Truth is a photography project about ‘seeing something when there’s nothing there’. Based in the research group’s initial intent to overcome the spatial resolution limits of satellite imagery, the project now investigates new imaging techniques such as computational photography and hyperspectral imaging of forests, while also referencing photography’s love affair with natural landscapes. Such a comparative approach to natural photography has allowed me to offer a vision that typically escapes human sight perception.
I open this auto-theoretical text with a personal experience, namely being on a field trip with remote sensing scientist Daniel Schraik. I use this moment to, among other things, articulate my thoughts on the construction of the ‘real’ in different disciplines. I then contemplate the body of interviews and field trips that became a two-year-long interdisciplinary dialogue, and also brought together two distinct ways of looking at the forest: one symbolized by the camera, another by the terrestrial laser scanner. Inspired by remote sensing concepts such as ground truth and the inverse problem, I have come to examine photography through a new analytical framework.
In everyday language, the term ‘ground truth’ refers, in part, to a first-hand experience. In our project, it makes sense, then, that Ground Truth connotes the documentary tradition and the act of witnessing. In the language of science, however, and specifically in remote sensing as a field, ground truth means something different. It refers to data collected on-site, which can then be used to calibrate, to build models, to predict, to interpret, and to decipher information from images; in this case, satellite images. Similarly, our interdisciplinary collaboration functions on another operational layer of photography beneath the immediately visible, one that illustrates an expanded notion of photography across contemporary discourse. Ground Truth interweaves archival imagery, documentary photography, experiment dataset, 3D digital art and conceptual photography. The constellation of employed elements contrasts the representational approaches of drawing and photography with the data-oriented and algorithmic approaches of computer-aided seeing. The two modes together allow for a parallel reading of the forest — one that contextualizes different epistemological regimes that allow for new configurations of the relationship between image and reality.
The Hiss of Data
(2018)
author(s): Cormac Deane
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article conducts an examination of the connections between the fantasy user interfaces (FUIs) of computers in the television shows 24 and CSI and the sounds that they emit. The resulting sense of computational activity produces what might be characterized as a digital subjectivity. The significance of this kind of subjectivity is considered in relation to: the historical context of contemporary television/cinema (‘TVIII’); the apparently cybernetic tendencies of complex screen environments; and the political ramifications of a logic of computation. The competing claims of the sound and the image to be the prior, determining factor are discussed. It becomes clear that the distinction between what constitutes information and what constitutes noise (audio and non-informational) is a key problematic both within the screen narratives in question and in the broader media environment that they occupy.
Peri / G - Weaving together knowledge and embodiment - Finding the intersections between your own peer-reviewed scientific research and artistic work
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Katri Johanna Koivuneva
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This project explores how to approach the paradigm of embodiment and research in a post-digital society from a personal perspective, combining the academic, peer-reviewed lens of media education research with the artistic, embodied perspective of a dance artist.
The intersection of research and art in the digital age has been examined from myriad perspectives, yet often misses a crucial point: our bodies—and, by extension, the creation of art from a corporeal perspective—have been fundamentally altered in the frame of reference of post-digital and post-digital art. In the post-digital era, digitality is no longer a mere extension or prosthesis that perpetuates humanity. Rather, technology and computation have become so integral to our culture and bodies that digitality is only recognized as a core part of our identity when its absence is noticed.
Recent research shows that metacognitive awareness—our understanding of how and why we do things—aligns with approaches to learning and helps explain the strain we experience in post-digital environments (Koivuneva & Ruokamo, 2023; Koivuneva et al., submitted for evaluation; Koivuneva, 2025). Previous studies have often narrowed the concept of metacognition and its dimensions, but new quantitative methods, including those from my own research, have revealed additional dimensions of metacognitive awareness. These findings have significant implications for how we describe our reality. As Bogot (2024) asserts, "Culture moves through computation." Indeed, our evolved metacognitive consciousness is four-dimensional rather than two-dimensional. In post-digital environments, we consciously observe and focus on specific phenomena while also planning how to navigate these spaces in ways that reduce cognitive burden and foster meaningful connections with others. This helps us create deeper associations between the knowledge we acquire and our lived reality.
The phenomena from which we derive knowledge are all filtered through some form of computation. Scientists structure knowledge through various computational methods, while dance artists filter it through embodied practices. What unites these phenomena is that nearly all the information we encounter today is mediated by technology and computation, fundamentally altering how we relate to the world around us.
The way we learn has shifted, and our bodies now move within realities shaped by computers. The potential realities are expanding—limited only by the infinite possibilities created by artificial intelligence.
How can counterpoint be computed? Instead of looking at counterpoint solely from a historical perspective and reducing it to "music trend of the past", the research contemplates counterpoint as generative technique while exploring its immense yet mechanical creative power through a small selection of case-studies. Finally, a few thoughts are spent on the meaning of rules in music and the role of the computer in historically informed practice is briefly investigated.open exposition comments (1)
This article conducts an examination of the connections between the fantasy user interfaces (FUIs) of computers in the television shows 24 and CSI and the sounds that they emit. The resulting sense of computational activity produces what might be characterized as a digital subjectivity. The significance of this kind of subjectivity is considered in relation to: the historical context of contemporary television/cinema (‘TVIII’); the apparently cybernetic tendencies of complex screen environments; and the political ramifications of a logic of computation. The competing claims of the sound and the image to be the prior, determining factor are discussed. It becomes clear that the distinction between what constitutes information and what constitutes noise (audio and non-informational) is a key problematic both within the screen narratives in question and in the broader media environment that they occupy.open exposition comments (0)