Embodied/Encoded: A Study of Presence in Digital Music
(2024)
author(s): Robert Seaback
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
Presence in Embodied/Encoded is concerned with the physical and embodied dimensions of musicking in relation to digital-informational representations of such phenomena. I explore presence through practices of recording, creative coding, audio production, and spatial electronic music composition. Of particular interest is the link between presence and the sensual/corporeal aspects of sound production and listening. Research in embodied music cognition and extended reality provide a foundation for this type of meaning formation.
In the context of immersive electronic music, I suggest that physical presence – a sense of ‘being somewhere’—emerges not just from images/representations of place, but from peripheral aspects of the (embodied) acoustic experience such as spatial proximity and distance, diffuseness, resonance and reverberation, noise floor, etc. Consequently, musical meaning in “Embodied/Encoded” moves away from the symbolic dimension of electronic sounds toward meaning as an outcome of embodied interaction with the environment. The concept of presence can also apply to ‘mixed’ music, or combinations of acoustic and electronic sources, in which virtual presence is complicated by real bodies and spaces.
Digital technology renders sound a flexible, malleable entity—a ‘flickering’ signifier to borrow from Hayles—capable of reconfiguring presence in creative ways. The dance between encoded and embodied dimensions inspires and informs this artistic research. Through a body of immersive music and multimedia documentation, I unpack connections between presence and its digital abstractions.
Virtual Hallucinations
(2024)
author(s): Emma Richey
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
A master's thesis that aims to see how 2D animation can visualize hallucinations in VR, while examining the greyzone between technology and spirituality in the animation process. The animations are made for the VR documentary film: Urban Witches, by Nicia Fernandez.
Nothingness in the digital Space
(2024)
author(s): Valerie Messini
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Valerie Messini (Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Culture) chooses the phenomenon of emptiness in art as a point of departure for her contribution "Nothingness in the digital Space" and presents her artistic projects operating with different technologies to approach the phenomenon of emptiness in connection with corporeality in digital space. "1-NO1-100.000" uses dance movement to explore emptiness in virtual space, and "Deep Empty - Wide Open" uses deep learning to question the extent to which horizon lines function as mental voids.
Ways of expression: the impact of VFX technology on modern storytelling in film and interactive media production.
(2023)
author(s): Rafal Hanzl
published in: University of Inland Norway
The rapid development and adoption of digital technology expanded horizons of creativity and opened new artistic frontiers. The broad array of options can potentially have a negative effect, however, as artists can become overwhelmed by the means of expression enabled by new methods they could never have imagined were possible.
Visual communication assists storytelling and should be used precisely to emphasize the desired features of a story. In filmmaking, visual effects (VFX) should serve as a creative instrument to strengthen the story and artistic vision and communicate the desired idea to the audience. Using VFX in planning and developing the implementation of artistic ideas can play a key role in contemporary art as well. This challenge of visual communication is all the more noticeable in an emerging medium of virtual reality. I argue that VFX tools facilitates solving artistic problems in the majority of creative activities.
My project investigates the creative and artistic potential of the tools of digital manipulation. The research focuses on two key artistic creations: a feature documentary “In touch” and a virtual reality installation for the Lodz Philharmonic “The Road to Excellence”. Through artistic experiments performed in these two projects, I develop innovative creative methods for a new creative profession in the film and interactive media industry: a digital visual designer. My aim was to explore how this new artistic collaborator contributes to the visual universe of the artistic creation.
RNDR M3 4S (1) 0F UR AVATAR GRLS*
(2023)
author(s): AMUSED
published in: Research Catalogue
This thesis is aimed at investigating virtual embodiment and how it can affect a performer's experience of; and relationship to the physical body. With this auto ethnographic case study I hope to shed some light on the ways virtual reality technology enables critical experiences and what effects these experiences could have, through my own personal journey. The study was conducted in the setting of my home using a Pico 4 VR head mounted display and HTC vive full body tracking. The project used for the case study was an audiovisual pole dance performance that was performed on the platform Neos VR and streamed to Studio 44 in Stockholm. The research is rooted in the artistic field but draws knowledge from psychological and social research on VR as a cognitive and embodied technology. The research methods used to gather and analyse the research material were visual research, phenomenology and deep listening. The data collection consisted of visual and text based data. On the visual data I applied thematic analysis, coding and categorising of the text based data and analysing hyper reflections with a phenomenological approach. I found that the experience of virtual embodiment did change my relationship to my own body in a positive way by feeling more grounded and accepting. I was less anxious about performing and felt more confident in myself. Because of the entanglement of the study it was not possible to solely contribute the outcomes of the effect to virtual avatar embodiment in itself. It did however demonstrate how these VR technologies could be used to enable norm critical experiences by the use of norm critical design applied to avatars challenging beauty ideals and societal norms of performativity. My virtual embodiment and its effects on me can give a unique insight that would benefit developers and users active in these platforms as well as for personal introspection and self development. The study serves as a good base to build future research on and I intend to further elaborate on the extensive research data that was gathered.
HONEYMOON IN POMPEII - work in progress
(2021)
author(s): Sven Vinge
published in: International Center for Knowledge in the Arts (Denmark)
“HONEYMOON IN POMPEII – work-in-progress” is an artistic research project conducted at the National Film School of Denmark. In it, I explore transmediality through the production of a prototype artwork spanning film, literary text, sculpture, and virtual reality all loosely inspired by the archeological technique used to cast the Pompeian victims of the Vesuvius eruption in 79 ad.
I describe my initial inspiration and how I changed my intentions of exploring a consistent storyworld to more abstract associations and themes and the different collaborative efforts in producing the four parts of the prototype (a test not meant for public exhibition). The prototype ended up consisting of:
1) A film representing a foot specialist helping a costumer try running shoes in a sports store but showing an obsessive interest in her feet and crossing her personal boundaries.
2) A literary text consisting of selected passages of Wilhelm Jensen’s short novel “Gradiva” (1902) translated to Danish in which we meet the young archeologist Norbert Hanold and notice his obsession with an ancient bas-relief portraying a young woman walking.
3) A sculpture consisting of four transparent plastic reliefs depicting a walking woman (copies of the bas-relief described in the novel) suspended in a 1x2x2 meter aluminum frame.
4) An erotic virtual reality experience in which the perceiver’s bodily movements affects the virtual world. When moving, the represented scene freezes and vice versa.
We conducted a test of the joint transmedia artwork with a small group of respondents who answered a questionnaire reflecting on their experience. I reflect on the respondent’s answers and propose further questions and themes that may be interesting to explore through artistic research: How does one explore transmediality not necessarily in relation to a consistent storyworld but also relying on abstract characteristics? What are the limits (if any) between mixed media art, transmedia art, and installation art? How can transmediality be explored as either a goal in itself or as a development tool for artists working with particular media in mind? Could it be beneficial to explore transmediality through the metaphor of archeology and how?
Beyond the Visual - A research curriculum for explorations in spatiotemporal environments
(2021)
author(s): Constantinos Miltiadis, Gerriet K. Sharma
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Virtual reality and spatial audio technologies bring about a new paradigm in the fields of architecture and music. Works developed in these media produce experiences beyond what is perceivable in the physical world, extending therefore our capacities to design/compose as well as our sensibilities for spatial and temporal perception. By operating in the spatiotemporal domain, these new media, question our disciplinary understandings of space and time as well as their aesthetics, requiring an altogether new post-disciplinary conception of design/composition and experience.
"Beyond the Visual" is a research curriculum for the investigation of spatiotemporal aesthetics, in the interface between architecture and music, in regard to perception and creativity and design/composition.
This exposition is part of the research agenda of the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SIG): Spatial Aesthetics and Artificial Environments.
Queers, Crips, and Mermaids: Disruptive Bodies as Performative Objects
(2021)
author(s): Kamran Behrouz
published in: Research Catalogue
This chapter attempts to analyze and unfold interlinked layers of a research-performance, in two interconnected site-specific Acts. First Act (Collision) happened in St. Moritz 2020 and the second Act was performed a year later in Bern 2021 . By adopting the notion of “cosmopolitics” as a method, this Performance attempts to speculate inter-relativity of human and non-human bodies within the capitalist matrix of species hierarchy. Through comparative analysis of different psycho-cultural/political narratives, this text attempts to map out interconnected traumas of transspecies; wounds and scars that are older than our bodies, older than ourselves. This text uses diffractive reading of these two Acts through the histories of the figure of the mermaid and the witch, In order to queer the hegemonic interpretations of both figures.
Absurd Sounds
(2021)
author(s): Yann Coppier
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Absurd (derived from surdus, or deaf, in Latin): that which cannot be heard or is contradictory to reason.
This artistic research project questions the ways we work with sound, using a methodology derived from the absurd as a tool for innovation.
The scientific roots of sound as a physical phenomenon are rarely disputed, whether by sound artists, sound designers, sound technicians, or even composers. Yet this trust in the knowledge built by acousticians, so complex and yet so simple as it mostly limits the characteristics of sound to amplitude, pitch, timbre, and envelope, might lead to an incapacity to look any other way. Have we missed, as artists, the opportunity to question the underlying axioms beneath the science of sound?
This research uses a method based on the rejection — or, better, a questioning — of established rules and ideas (e.g., ‘what if silence were a building tool with which we carved music and sounds into blocks of noise?’), followed by a series of logical developments until some new technique, idea, or even form of art emerges. Such a method somehow adopts the principles behind conspiracy theories and applies them to art: absurd premises followed by logical developments.
The present exposition develops a set of three case studies built between 2017 and 2020, each one answering its own absurd question: the harvesting of rare sounds made by worms (what if silence were louder than noise?); an experiment carried out on humans, by loudspeakers sitting as members of the audience (what if there were no ‘sweet spot’?); and an attempt to blur the lines between the real and the virtual, while developing new ways to document sound art (what if there were no (virtual) reality?).
Cover photo for the exposition 'Absurd Sounds' by Anders Sune Berg, 2017.
Reclamation : Exposing Coal Seams and Appalachian Fatalism with Digital Apparatuses
(2020)
author(s): Ernie Roby-Tomic
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The mountainous geography of Appalachia has been shaped by the coal industry since the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era of the United States. Mountaintop Removal (MTR) is a controversial and highly destructive surface-mining method flattening the mountains of Appalachian since the 1970s. The rise in massive energy consumption correlated to consumer electronics, automation, and technocratic neoliberalism have irrevocably flattened the surface and culture of Appalachia.
Reclamation is the final act in MTR mining in which the mine operator is obligated to ecologically restore the land. Where MTR sites were once hidden away, and even photographing them is considered an act of trespassing, today I can bear witness to the destruction of the mountain topology by connecting to Google's Earth (not to be confused with earth-Earth). Despite the remote locations and inaccessibility of the sites, the data is particularly rich due to the economical advantages of mapping the region for the coal industry.
In this exposition, I make my own reclamation as one in the generation born after the boom of coal production and its inevitable decline. I am reclaiming the 3D geospatial data of MTR and mining disaster sites, extracted from the servers of Google Earth. I recontextualize these geospatial assets to compose a visual prosopography of those surfaces.
NetArt-Liveness
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Marko Ciciliani
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In this project I try to create the experience of presence and liveness in virtual browser-based spaces, in order to enable aesthetic experiences with qualities that are usually rather attributed to the physical world. However, the virtual environment will not be used to reproduce experiences of the physical world in an identical way. Instead, the research process is intended to identify specifities of presence and liveness in the digital world.
The core question to be researched is in shortest form:
How can virtual spaces be built into web pages that offer audiovisual experiences with qualities of presence and liveness that are comparable with experiences in non-virtual environments, but at the same time unfold media-specific characteristics?
Passions of Utopia
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Johannes Rydinger, Nicia Ivonne Fernandez Grijalva, Yasmin Henra van Dorp
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Passions of Utopia is a collaborative artistic research project exploring futuremaking and storytelling through the lens of a 360-camera and telenovela tropes.
By using the cynical, plastical and exaggerated form of the telenovela we are trying to explore themes such as future, desire and truth.
Part of the process led to a 20 minutes VR-experience where the audience can take part in a immersive telenovela. It was also showed at ETC Solpark as a part of the interdisciplinary exposition and publication Awesome Arrarat
Throguh a web of different methods, where classic film production work flows and 360-action camera filmmaking is weaved together with site specific installations, we also want to explore narratives that contribute to fiction storytelling through VR in a playful way
The team consists of Yasmin Van Dorp, Nicia Fernández and Johannes Rydinger, students at the masterprogram The Art of Impact at Stockholm University of the Arts
360° Experiments in Deep Canine Topography:
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Darren O'Brien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Operating at the intersection of fine art walking practice, psychogeography, critical animal studies and ecology, the practice of Deep Canine Topography seeks to reframe the humble act of the ‘walkies’ as a co-authored act of ‘making’ or ‘performing’ together.
As part of the practice based element of my PhD thesis, Deep Canine Topography, this visual and sonic experiment explores both 360° canine POV film making and augmented and super-sensory human-canine soundscapes.
Films can be experienced with a virtual reality headset, or mobile phone and VR headset, via the Vimeo links provided.
The augmented super-sonic soundscape has to be experienced in person, and therefore a document of the practice is presented and a description of equipment needed to carry out your own experiments with your own canine companion.
Clicking on the round MAP circle will take you to the central exposition of my PhD: Deep Canine Topography.
A new language for cities
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Emma Harriet Austin Creed
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A new language for cities is an exploration into how Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and New Media (XR) can help to make art more inclusive through re-introducing it into everyday life, allowing audiences to consider the environment around them in new, playful, immersive and interactive ways.
Cities are living organisms in the sense that no matter our intentions when working with architecture and urban planning, we cannot guarantee how a certain space or environment will be used. The purpose and use of a space is dependent on the people who inhabit it, not those that create it. As such, each corner of a city has a story to tell. The daily interactions of the people who live and work there leave a mark that creates an intimate narrative around what it means to live a life.
As an artist I am interested in exploring both what has alienated people to different forms of art and also encouraged them to engage with it. I believe that XR has the possibility to play with the reality of how people will interact with a city, exploring historical and current narratives to reconnect alienated audiences with art by literally bringing it to them.
A master's thesis that aims to see how 2D animation can visualize hallucinations in VR, while examining the greyzone between technology and spirituality in the animation process. The animations are made for the VR documentary film: Urban Witches, by Nicia Fernandez.open exposition comments (0)
Valerie Messini (Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Culture) chooses the phenomenon of emptiness in art as a point of departure for her contribution "Nothingness in the digital Space" and presents her artistic projects operating with different technologies to approach the phenomenon of emptiness in connection with corporeality in digital space. "1-NO1-100.000" uses dance movement to explore emptiness in virtual space, and "Deep Empty - Wide Open" uses deep learning to question the extent to which horizon lines function as mental voids.open exposition comments (0)
This chapter attempts to analyze and unfold interlinked layers of a research-performance, in two interconnected site-specific Acts. First Act (Collision) happened in St. Moritz 2020 and the second Act was performed a year later in Bern 2021 . By adopting the notion of “cosmopolitics” as a method, this Performance attempts to speculate inter-relativity of human and non-human bodies within the capitalist matrix of species hierarchy. Through comparative analysis of different psycho-cultural/political narratives, this text attempts to map out interconnected traumas of transspecies; wounds and scars that are older than our bodies, older than ourselves. This text uses diffractive reading of these two Acts through the histories of the figure of the mermaid and the witch, In order to queer the hegemonic interpretations of both figures.open exposition comments (0)