CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Skyler and Bliss

Hong Kong remains the backdrop to the science fiction movies of my youth. The city reminds me of my former training in the financial sector. It is a city in which I could have succeeded in finance, but as far as art goes it is a young city, and I am a young artist. A frustration emerges; much like the mould, the artist also had to develop new skills by killing off his former desires and manipulating technology. My new series entitled HONG KONG surface project shows a new direction in my artistic research in which my technique becomes ever simpler, reducing the traces of pixelation until objects appear almost as they were found and photographed. Skyler and Bliss presents tectonic plates based on satellite images of the Arctic. Working in a hot and humid Hong Kong where mushrooms grow ferociously, a city artificially refrigerated by climate control, this series provides a conceptual image of a imaginary typographic map for survival. (Laurent Segretier

Interaction and the Art of User-Centered Digital Musical Instrument Design

This thesis documents the formulation of a research-based practice in multimedia art, technology and digital musical instrument design. The primary goal of my research was to investigate the principles and methodologies involved in the structural design of new interactive digital musical instruments aimed at performance by members of the general public, and to identify ways that the design process could be optimized to increase user adoption of these new instruments. The research was performed over three years and moved between studies at the University of Maine, internships in New York, and specialized research at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory at McGill University. My work is presented in two sections. The first covers early studies in user interaction and exploratory works in web and visual design, sound art, installation, and music performance. While not specifically tied to the research topic of user adoption of digital musical instruments, this work serves as the conceptual and technical background for the dedicated work to follow. The second section is dedicated to focused research on digital musical instrument design through two major projects carried out as a Graduate Research Trainee at McGill University. The first was the design and prototype of the Noisebox, a new digital musical instrument. The purpose of this project was to learn the various stages of instrument design through practical application. A working prototype has been presented and tested, and a second version is currently being built. The second project was a user study that surveyed musicians about digital musical instrument use. It asked questions about background, instrument choice, music styles played, and experiences with and attitudes towards new digital musical instruments. Based on the results of the two research projects, a model of digital musical instrument design is proposed that adopts a user-centered focus, soliciting user input and feedback throughout the design process from conception to final testing. This approach aims to narrow the gap between conceptual design of new instruments and technologies and the actual musicians who would use them

Annual Report 1984-1985

'This is your Park, and your children's. Our task is to help you use and enjoy this Park in ways which conserve the beauty, diversity and abundance of the animals and plants which live here in the magic world of the Great Barrier Reef. We hope that this kit will increase your knowledge and enjoyment of the Reef and its wild inhabitants and stimulate your curiosity about how they live and interact in this complex natural system.

ImMApp: An immersive database of sound art

The ImMApp (Immersive Mapping Application) thesis addresses contemporary and historical sound art from a position informed by, on one hand, post-structural critical theory, and on the other, a practice-based exploration of contemporary digital technologies (MySQL, XML, XSLT, X3D). It proposes a critical ontological schema derived from Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and applies this to pre-existing information resources dealing with sound art. Firstly an analysis of print-based discourses (Sound by Artists. Lander and Lexier (1990), Noise, Water, Meat. Kahn (2001) and Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. LaBelle (2006» is carried out according to Foucauldian notions of genealogy, subject positions, the statement, institutional affordances and the productive nature of discursive formation. The discursive field (the archive) presented by these major canonical texts is then contrasted with a formulation derived from Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: that of a 'minor' history of sound art practices. This is then extended by media theory (McLuhan, Kittler, Manovich) into a critique of two digital sound art resources (The Australian Sound Design Project (Bandt and Paine (2005) and soundtoys.net Stanza (1998). The divergences between the two forms of information technologies (print vs. digital) are discussed. The means by which such digitised methodologies may enhance Foucauldian discourse analysis points onwards towards the two practice-based elements of the thesis. Surface, the first iterative part, is a web-browser based database built on an Apache/MySQIlXML architecture. It is the most extensive mapping of sound art undertaken to date and extends the theoretical framework discussed above into the digital domain. Immersion, the second part, is a re-presentation of this material in an immersive digital environment, following the transformation of the source material via XSL-T into X3D. Immersion is a real-time, large format video, surround sound (5.ln.l) installation and the thesis concludes with a discussion of how this outcome has articulated Foucauldian archaeological method and unframed pre-existing notions of the nature of sound art

Operative-images and phantom-images: the synthetic perception media in late Harun Farocki

ABSTRACT - The images produced by cameras mounted on the front of projectiles, Farocki designates them as operative-images. The operational function of these images is to serve an automated vision machine, programmed for the detection of targets and re-orientation of the route of the missiles. The most important feature of technical images, according to Vilém Flusser, is that they materialize certain concepts about the world, precisely the concepts that guided the construction of devices that shape them. Thus, photography, very unlike automatically record impressions of the physical world, transcodes certain scientific theories into images, or to use Flusser´s own words, turns concepts into scenes. We suggest that the final stage, the perfect crime, of visionic technologies would be the production of synthetic images not intended for the biological human eye, as hitherto, but for the artificial vision - vision synthetically prepared by the cybernetic ideology of control. Today is impossible to describe the development of the audiovisual without also talking about the development of virtual imagery and its influence on human behavior or without point to the new industrialization of vision and the growth of a big market for synthetic perception, with all the ethical issues that this entails. Finally, we propose that to understand a significant part of Harun Farocki’s late work would also be useful the concept of neural-image as a component of a networked media practice, related to the ubiquity of digital technologies but also with the presence of surveillance devices in our contemporary visual culture.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Ethnography and experimental non-fiction storytelling: relating the experiences of Maltese Fishermen

In this practice-based exploration I look at the dynamics of long-term ethnographic research to address the tensions between lived experience and conventional narrative constructs of Mediterranean identities. This research also fills a void in the anthropology of fishermen in Malta which as an area of academic investigation has remained understudied. Speculating on relational meaning making processes and multidimensional and experimental qualities inherent to ethnographic research, I produced non-linear multimodal documentary works as environments with the capacity to engender tangible, immersive and tacit knowledge about situated identities. Using my seven-year engagement with a family of fishermen from Marsaxlokk, a small fishing port in the south eastern part of Malta, I reflect on how situated learning experiences can inform experimental non-fiction audio-visual storytelling. In my research I draw on theories of affect and notions of the archivalto reflect on the ways Mediterranean identities are constructed. Examining the ecology of relations that binds together the people and the environment that they inhabit I engage with current discourses on multisensory ethnography, documentary making and narrative power to explore my practice (including two photographic essays, a sound installation, two gallery video projections and a web-based documentary prototype) as a process of creative mediation between the fishermen’s world and the public. Using select examples from my fieldwork recordings I show how embodied audio-visual practices enable nonfiction storytellers to re-propose the conditions of the ethnographic encounter. I look at how, responding to the very particular environmental and socio-cultural conditions of my field of study, I took my practice beyond the canons of traditional documentary photography towards an expanded multimedia form of storytelling. More specifically, I refer to my experiences with people working on and around the Joan of Arc(the family boat), as well as my apprenticeship as a deckhand/fisherman, to examine notions of emplaced learning, collaborative meaning making processes and affective strategies for the development of creative sensory-rich immersive storytelling strategies that provide amore nuanced understanding of Mediterranean identities

Music 2025 : The Music Data Dilemma: issues facing the music industry in improving data management

© Crown Copyright 2019Music 2025ʼ investigates the infrastructure issues around the management of digital data in an increasingly stream driven industry. The findings are the culmination of over 50 interviews with high profile music industry representatives across the sector and reflects key issues as well as areas of consensus and contrasting views. The findings reveal whilst there are great examples of data initiatives across the value chain, there are opportunities to improve efficiency and interoperability

Film, Video, and Digitality: An Analysis of Cultural Form in Time-based Media

This thesis examines the material properties of time-based image media, in particular live video. The project is practice-based with a theoretical underpinning drawn from the debates on form and meaning associated with Walter Benjamin