Interactivos? process as paradigm
Interactivos? process as paradigm is a research and production platform for the creative and educational uses of technology. Its main goal is to expand on the use of electronic and software tools for artists, designers and educators, thus contributing to the development of local communities of cultural producers in this field.
Introducción
ABOUT INTERACTIVOS?
Interactivos? is a research and production platform for the creative and educational uses of technology. Its main goal is to expand on the use of electronic and software tools for artists, designers and educators, thus contributing to the development of local communities of cultural producers in this field.
Interactivos? events are a hybrid between a production workshop, a seminar and a showcase. A space for reflection, research, and collaborative work is created, in which proposals selected by an international open call are developed, completed and displayed. Theprocess is open to the public from beginning to end.
In the past weeks there was an international open call for projects determinated by a theme where 8 projects were selected to be developed during the 8th and the 20th of April. Different participants will collaborate in working groups for the development of each of the projects. At the begginning of the workshop there will be a presentation of each project and critic sessions with the curators from the exhibition process as paradigm, teachers and technical assistants. After the working process each group (author/s and collaborators) will start working separately technically and conceptually to realize the project during the two weeks of the workshop. The presentation of the finalized projects will be presented on the 21st of April and then they will take part in the exhibition process as paradigm which opens on the 23th of April.
CALL FOR COLLABORATORS
If you are interested in participating in Interactivos? process as paradigm as collaborators in the selected projects, participating in the workshop, seminars and events, experimenting a space of exchange and creation, you can do it by filling the on-line form located below this text before the 5th of April, indicating in which of the eight projects you would like to collaborate.
Go to selected projects
Lodging will be covered for two collaborators per project at first come first serve basys. Travel costs and expenses will be not covered.
Dates of the workshop: from 8th to the 20th of April 2010
Location: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Please contact us if you have any question: interactivos@laboralcentrodearte.org
Selected projects
Everything is under control by Tomasso Lanza and Cathrine Kramer
Grass is the most widespread plant type and serves as the perfect example when trying to understand what nature is in this day and age. Although it grows naturally and relies on biological processes, its prolific application also demonstrates how we shape and try to control the natural environment to suit our needs and desires as humans. This installation aims to highlight this conflict by exploiting a dynamic adaptive biological system within a mechanically controlled environment. A new form of fabbing using light and fertilizers will be implemented to selectively influence the growth of grass.
During the workshop we propose to create an installation that consists of the following:
- An indoor flowerbed planted with grass seeds.
- A custom built two-axis CNC plotting mechanism moving a single light source positioned at a short distance from the flowerbed, repeatedly writing the words 'EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL'.
The exact form of the device would develop through the collaborative workshop, and the resulting construction would be exhibited in a dimly lit environment, where the plotter can control the areas of growth within the flowerbed. As people visit the installation, they will see a light beam constantly moving over the flowerbed in a seemingly random fashion. Only over time will growth patterns be observable, eventually revealing the message. How readable the message will be remains an open question. Through the ongoing process we will be witness to a silent dialogue between natural emergence and control.
7th degree of freedom by Petr Svarovsky
Nowadays, computers and mobile devices play significant role in our lives. Together with cloud computing concept, they are very helpful in many everyday situations. On the other hand, application designers have great influence on our behavior. Through the binary code, programmers can control human behavior. People are becoming aware of that. Surprisingly, they don't mind, some even like it. Why not to satisfy them more?
APM is mashup of FaceBook event, iPhone App and FlashMob. Players are invited to event via Facebook. They download a game to their iPhones and they follow instructions. First, they are asked to come to certain place at certain time. When there, they put earplugs to their ears and they await for audio instructions from their iPhone. Server evaluates their positions, generates a play script and starts to send instructions to them. Each person is assigned a certain character, without knowing it. Based on idea of the hidden theatre by Augusto Boal or a conspiration ideas of early Flash Mobs, they play a drama in public space, without letting public know.
We claim human2human comunication back from machines. Today, most of communication between people is mediated via computers and mobile phones. We pervert technology to force people to talk directly. We control the way they do it , we observe it and evaluate it. Wa want people to enhance direct communication, because we believe that simulated communication can be a problem.
Artificial intelligence on Internet server evaluates conditions (number and position of potential players) and makes a decision where and when to arrange a performance. Players are informed, they must confirm a participation. server evaluates a number and position of players again just before game start. It generates a script and assigns roles to players (without letting them know). It sends audio commands to players then, evaluating their behavior (using accelerometer sensors and GPS chip primarily, a microphone can be considered as well), constantly evaluating the game progress and sending commands again. The session lasts usually 1 - 2 hours.
Practice mapping by Wouter van de Broeck and Marco Quaggiotto
Although the creative process is often seen as an achievement of a lone mind, in reality it rarely, if ever, is. Interactions with both natural, social and textual actors contribute to the creative process, which in the end appears as a recombination of experiences in a synthetic practice. The aim of the project is to expose these interactions, taking the interactivos? workshop as a case study. Active-RFID technology and logging systems will be deployed to collect data on these interactions and their evolution over time. The collected data will be mapped in a visual narrative, a system of maps – both dynamic and static – able to express the synthetic nature of the creative practice. For more information see http://practicemapping.org.
Although the creative process is often seen as an achievement of a lone mind, in reality it is seldom – if ever – a process in which an author independently builds something out of nothing, but rather a process governed by complex, multifaceted interactions of the author with its environment. Interactions with people, objects, tools, signs, and texts –in sum, the fact of being immersed in a given context– shapes this process and its produce. The creative process is, more than anything else, a compilation and transformation process in which the subject – more artisan than demiurge – strategically combines experiences and interactions with the environment in a synthetic practice.
The Practice Mapping project aims to expose the interaction dynamics involved in a practice. It is, however, not only interested in the static network of the entities involved in the practice, but also, and perhaps even more so, in the dynamics of this network: how it grows and transforms over time.
the Interactivos? workshop will assemble a number of people and objects in a bustling mass of creativity. It forms an excellent case study and unique opportunity for observing and mapping the dynamics of the creative practices as they take shape. We want to make visible the network of interactions between the involved people, significant objects and work tools, relevant locations in and around the workshop, and events as logged by the participants. To attain the objective of exposing these practice dynamics, we propose to blend scientific data collection and analysis techniques, with artistic reinterpretation methodologies in order to build a visual narrative of the processes that take place during the workshop. We plan to link different representations in an atlas of interactions: a system of maps – both dynamic and static – able to express the synthetic nature of the creative practice.
http://practicemapping.org
Photographic spatial experiment by Boris Oicherman
The Photographic Spatial Experiment is an attempt to construct a generative photographic device for the real-time transformations of spaces. In this device, cameras continuously sample the space while digital projectors illuminate it by spatially and temporally modulated light flux. The only light available for the cameras is the output of digital projectors, and the only input to the projectors is the processed imagery from the cameras. The device continuously modifies the perceptual properties of the space so that the space develops and dynamically reacts to the events within and around it. The public is captured by the camera so it has a natural control overt the system's input, and actively participates in the production of the space.
Human perception processes have certain “assumptions” on the way environment is built and operating. In part these assumptions are cultural constructs, but many are results of evolutionary development, and provide an aid in survival: events contradicting the built-in assumption can mean danger. What are the perceptual and emotional consequences of entering the space whose configuration is visually unstable?
This project is an experiment in use of photographic technologies for construction of dynamic spaces. It is based on two technical premises:
1) the digital projectors are, technically speaking, programmable light sources, and the projected photograph is merely a spatially and temporally modulated light flux;
2) a photograph is a dynamic entity and, when output by a digital projector, defines the spatial and temporal properties of the generated light flux.
In other words, we can use digital projectors to illuminate spaces by images, rather then to display pictures.
These two realizations are used to construct a device which, for the lack of a better name, will be called for now “Programmable Mirror” (PM). It consists of a digital camera, a digital projector, and a computer which controls both. In its most basic form, the operation of this device is reflecting the space upon itself:
- The camera captures the space
- The projector throws the captured image back into the space, thus illuminating it with its own image
- The camera captures the space illuminated by its own image, thus closing the loop: from now on, the space and its photographed image are continuously modulating each other.
Territoris Oblidats by Inês Salpico
Participative web platform aiming at documenting and maping the Territoris Oblidats (Forgetten Territories) of Catalonia. The main is goal is that people can submit information and geographic references on disqualified areas/spots such as industrial derelict spaces, abandoned buildings/lots, etc…, that can be traced, mapped and documented online.
The platform will also gather referential information (bibliography, news, events, etc…) on subjects related with urban planning, Land Art, public space and intervention, etc, working as a node and a catalyst of a debate on how territory is planned, managed and occupied and on what tools are available to make its management an open, participative and sensible process.
So as to document and open the searching process of the territory in which the Land Art project Art_TO_Cat aims to intervene, we’ve structured a web platform where all the Forgotten Territories we’ve identified might me referenced and mapped, along with all those that are yet to be traced. It will be an open platform, meaning that we call for any interested individuals to send us information on disqualified territories they identify themselves.
The platform will also work as an information node on the raised issues and implicated disciplines (architecture, landscape architecture, ecology, urban planning, public art, etc.). A regular update on events, bibliographic references, links and other developed related actions will be made.
Due to its participative aspect this process hopes to promote a critic view on current territory planning, as well as implicate communities in the debate on the quality of urban and peri-urban surroundings and on sustainable development and planning strategies.
DRIVEN BY by André Gonçalves
With this project it is my intention to develop a system analogous to GPS (Global Positioning System) which has a local objective and that can be seen as a simplified miniature of the GPS or as a recreation that tries to metaphorically emulate it's working method. To this simplification, somehow reductionist, some primordial elements will be replaced by others that will replace their conceptual role. This process started with an equivalency search only possible by the analysis and de-construction of it's parts - the active entities of the system. With this point of view the GPS system can be conceptually resumed to two entities: the first, understood as passive, omnipresent and organized system; and the second, understood as group of several smaller entities that resume themselves as an active single body totally independent among themselves.
Looking at the consciousness of each of the parts, and detaching all political related analysis, we can point out that the first has a global passive awareness and the second a partial active awareness.
This two entities operate in a geographic context that although conventioned as global it resumes itself to the hearth globe, this limitation in the system range has as it's own limit the space where human beings inhabits, therefore, creating a parallelism with this idea, i intend to focus the limit of my piece's range to the space where art inhabits, limited by the art gallery space or the space occupied by a piece in an exhibition context, that will be the range of my gps.
FrankenFoodCart by Zackery Denfeld Denfeld
is a mobile media cart and public lab that documents, grows and cooks Genetically Engineered (GE) foods. We will draw on Spanish food culture to create public cooking demonstrations that explore and demystify the production and consumption of GE Foods in society.
While in Spain we will acquire, plant and prepare GE foods in collaborative events, asking scientists, farmers, activists and bureaucrats about interesting ways to prepare GE Foods. This process will spawn new recipes and maps of the legal and technological properties of ingredients. These artifacts will be presented in the form of a printed and electronic cookbook. Visitors to the cart can eat the recipes or share their own ideas for cooking with GE foods.
FrankenFoodCart will use the processes of collecting ingredients & stories, cooking and writing recipes while in Spain in order to create a new chapter of its cook book. The research and creation of recipes will be conducted locally and shared physically in a mobile food cart, as well as published electronically. In addition, one formal dinner will be curated where chefs, scientists, farmers and other interested members of the public are invited to eat and share ideas about food, agriculture and technology.
Scan-it by María Castellano and Alberto Valverde
Scan-it is a project based on image transformation processes and on the study of data loss in the coding and decoding of images.
It involves processing a digital image using a program written with "Processing" software that transforms the initial image into digital pixels. These pixels are subsequently converted to physical paper “pixels” which will be used to construct a large mural. The final process of decoding the image will be carried out by visitors to the exhibition, who will be able to take the paper pixels home and enter a numerical code into the web site. In this way, the image will be reconstructed back into digital form, pixel by pixel, in a process that functions like a huge analogue scanner.
Scan-it is a project conceived for creating collaborative analogical scans. The project involves creating a large-scale drawing or mural on a wall using small paper circles or "pixels". The project web site is printed on each circular dot, together with a numerical code. The back of the dots contain instructions to be followed by visitors to the exhibition who will actively participate in the process of the work.
Public intervention is as simple as going to the web site and entering the code. When a visitor enters the unique code printed on the dot that he or she took home, the pixel will be displayed on the computer screen in its original position, so that the physical image in the exhibition space is transformed into a digital image online.
Scan-it is a process-based piece, in which audience interaction is essential to achieving the final work. The digital image obtained once the exhibition is over will be the result of a scanning process made up by all the people who have seen the piece and decided to actively participate in it. The errors in the final digital image "scan" due to visitors forgetting or losing their pixels are an expected, integral part of the piece, creating an analogy with the real scanning progress and its inherent loss of data in relation to the initial image. Just as data is also lost when going from one format to another – as in the practical example we are dealing with here –, we start with a digital image and process it into digital pixels, which will later be transformed into physical “pixels” that visitors can take home.
Forum
The forum is a space for the communication between the developers interested in taking part at the Interactivos? process as paradigm production workshop. This workshop aims to be a collective platform for research, production and learning, offering substantial help and support in developing the projects selected through an open call . The proposals will be carried out in multidisciplinary task groups comprised by the author(s) and interested collaborators, with conceptual and technical advice from the teaching staff.
We ask authors of the selected proposlas to post a summary of the project, as well as their personal profile and the profile of the collaborators that would fit better with it. The idea is to allow both authors and collaborators to keep in contact. That way you could share interests, find out solutions for your questions and start creating the groups before the workshop starts.
Communications
Curatorial statement: Susanne Jaschko and Lucas Evers
At this point in time, we, the global society, are facing a series of processes that seemingly got out of our control. On-going conflicts in various parts of the world, the sudden melt-down of world economy and the menaces of climate change, only to name the big headlines, are valid proofs that we are deeply involved in social, ecologic and economic processes which are of such complexity that we have become aware of our limitations to manage them -- if at all in their entirety.
In the light of this finding, it seems to be natural that innovative contemporary art does no longer hold on to the save properties of the final object, the ultimate manifestation of a creative process, but moves to the uncertain territory of unpredictability and successive live generation of form.
This movement is also driven by the mayor shift from an industrial culture based on the concept of the final product to a post-industrial, networked culture built on the concept of global trade, production systems, mobile culture and distributed service industries.
The exhibition Process as Paradigm taking place from April 23 to September 27, 2010 at LABoral will present artworks which are all live processes. The artistic processes are designed by artists with different approaches and artistic practices. What unites them though is their common interest in the complexity, the temporal aspect, the interdependence and the self-organisation of processes. Consequently, all works investigate the vague terrain between pre-programming and autonomy, between preset development and randomness, thus delivering surprising insights into the nature of non-teleological processes and the limits and limitations of art.
The Interactivos workshop leading up to the exhibition is devoted to the production to artworks which follow the thesis of the exhibition.
Workshop participants will produce artworks that can fall into all three categories of the Process is Paradigm exhibition:
* automated / networked processes. Cybernetic systems and generative art investigate the qualities of machine-based processes and the influence the surrounding has on them. Here the shift from the mechanical to the digital age has motivated artists to create ever-changing systems rather than one end result.
* natural / biological processes. Humanity has taken enormous steps in understanding (living) nature and we are well able to manipulate and alter its form. Works in this category are either based on processes as they occur in nature or they are built on systems, which have a relevant organic/natural component.
* social processes. The third group of projects deals with processes of us humans in political, social, economic, technological and natural environments. Less natural or life sciences form the basis here, but socio-political and body politics, which are as equally moulded by complexity and process as the other works in the exhibition.
In addition the workshop looks at the current engagement of artistic practice with the processual perception of reality.
The workshop will be “technology agnostic”, though with emphasis on mobile applications. The projects will be presented in the exhibition in the form probes, prototypes and documentations.
Participation in the workshop will also be process oriented. The production of the works will be conducted in an open and co-creative fashion along with the documentation of the process that can take probing and prototyping beyond the duration of the workshop. Though it is up to the participants to decide, the organisers advocate the use of open licensing as part the production that can lead to truly open design.
Roman Kirschner
Time cannot be stopped. That hurts. Though we wish we could. And some people do manage to freeze it in images. But can this be the right representation of our times? Doesn't our life show us every day that the world around us is getting more and more fluid? Most of us are used to moving images since childhood. We are connected to a stream of colours, sounds and stories shooting through our heads. Cinema mass-produces insights into other people's inner worlds and creates universes and counter-universes. The recent informational environment transforms us into semionauts trying to make sense within an excessive supply of relations, connections and chain reactions. Our professions and interests make us spend time in front of screens where information arrives, materializes, causes changes in our sensory system and is hopefully answered or assimilated.
The average contemporary mind is forced to think in dynamical relations, in movements and chains of events. And what does it do to our imagination? Does it result in dynamic ideas? Does it make things move?
I would like to think of information as a dynamical process that continuously gives form to matter, challenges our perception and thus influences our imagination. But as information seems independent from its material basis, we are pushed to look at matter in a new way: as a carrier of information with a potential for change. And while society re-negotiates the boundaries of subjects and objects, objects are given are more active role. Their influence on situations is upvalued and some are even equipped with active behaviour. There seems to be a constant, slow movement of animating our environment, of materializing our dynamic obsessions.
If this simplified perspective on the present situation seems challenging to you, then come up with propositions for open processes that can be from of the 3 categories or even all of them. I encourage to be opne for the poetry of failure and the poetry of matter (like in Irrational Matter from “Water and Dreams” by Gaston Bachellar). Do not hesitate to try the impossible, to repeat things that seem impractical, to do things in a group that are only meant for individual and viceversa. But please, think about a result that is situated within the borders of human perception or dimension.
Allison Kudla
For the Interactivos? workshop that is running prior to the opening of “When Process Becomes Paradigm”, we are seeking proposals that suggest works that engage directly with biological processes. The workshop will last for two weeks, however it is expected that the work generated will go on, living a life of its own so to speak, for the duration of the six-month long exhibition and possibly beyond that. The final work produced by the workshop may be exhibited either within LABoral or outside of it in a botanical garden. It is our intent to find proposals that consider biological themes such as: the predicted vs. the emergent, the mechanistic vs. the vitalistic, the genetic vs. the epigenetic, progression vs. entropy, etc. We are also interested in works that deal with the reformation of living systems, chimeras, selective breeding... Another area of interest is in the transfer of human knowledge into a living organism, whereby the embedding of knowledge does not lose its value when encoded into the other species, but rather furthers the originating inquiry of the knowledge, allowing the human to engage with the information on a deeper level. In conclusion, it is our expectation that the proposal will allow for the co-mingling of biological systems with technological systems such as the mechanical or computational.
Antoni Abad: A Communal Webcasting Device / Collective Process
Since 2003, megafone.net (formerly known as zexe.net) has been inviting groups of people on the fringe of society to express their experiences and opinions through face-to-face editorial meetings and
mobile phones. The cell phones, which allow participants to create audio recordings and images that are immediately published to the Web, act as digital megaphones, amplifying the voices of individuals and groups who are often overlooked or misrepresented in mainstream media.
Megafone.net has developed ten projects with different communities: Taxi drivers from Mexico City 2004, young gypsies in Lleida and León (Spain 2005), prostitutes in Madrid 2005, Nicaraguan immigrants inCosta Rica 2006, motorcycle messengers (motoboys) in Sao Paolo 2007, displaced and demobilized people in Colombia and young Sahrawi refugees in the Algerian Sahara 2009.
Two projects were developed with people with limited mobility in Barcelona 2006 and Geneva 2008. For these projects, participants used GPS-enabled mobile phones to photograph obstacles and architectural
barriers they found in the streets and to create a real-time, web-based accessibility map of their cities.
At the heart of this project is the “communal mobile phone” concept, a portable GPS-enabled camera phone equipped with the recording and transmission facilities of the megafone software and designed to be used and shared by multiple participants. The megafone changes hands every week. During weekly editorial meetings, participants discuss the content of the webcasts, and allow each other to publish news and information. One communal mobile phone is designed for use by a group of up to four participants.
Megafone.net is a platform which can be useful as an alternative medium of communication for groups, collectives and associations who wish to organize themselves in order to project their own views and opinions, and counterbalance the negative stereotypes that the mass media disseminate when referring to them. Among its features, you will find geo-localization, which allows the carrying out of digital public cartography projects.
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Call for collaborators
You can still participate as a collaborators and get involved in the projects are being developed in the workshop-seminar Interactivos? Process as paradigm at Plataforma 0-LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. Please fill the form and join us in the space. Interactivos? started on the 8th and will be going on until the 20th of april. The projects will become part of the exhibition Process as paradigm.
