Out of body experiences: a practice-led evaluation of the shifting boundaries shared by analogue films and their digital counterparts

Phd ThesisThis thesis provides in-depth analysis of my practice-led PhD and the methods used to focus on key areas of research - namely exploring the shifting perceptual parameters revealed when analogue films are transferred to digital formats. With this process audio-visual content previously locked inside film’s decaying form is resurrected as immaterial code within a malleable frame. My work utilised this spectral quality to examine different layers of film representation, observing its inner structure, while also stepping back to contemplate its content from a self-reflexive distance. These multiple viewpoints introduced unique spaces within which to study the analogue past from a digital perspective: The filmstrip’s mechanically regulated motion seamlessly combines still images, sound and light into analogue interpretations of space-time. My work digitally desynchronised these elements, revealing the structural gaps between them while also suggesting their merger with a new perceptual model. Moving beyond internal film worlds to the boundaries they share with the physical viewing space, another layer of disjointed separation was introduced by producing screens that struggled to contain film content within their frames. Stepping back further, these screens occupied a space caught between the fixed viewpoint of a cinema and the multiple perspectives allowed by gallerybased installations. The shifting frame of these hybrid spaces created an oscillation between passive submersion within, and analytical distance from mediated worlds. By unmooring and offsetting the precise alignment between film structure, screens and viewing spaces, my practice revealed overlapping edges and disjointed spaces within which media from different eras interacted. This opened up new areas of research that fed directly into my theoretical studies (the thesis layout itself shifts outwards, from media structures to viewing spaces). This approach enabled me to produce a substantial body of work, iii offering an original contribution to this field

Material agency and performative dynamics in the practices of media art

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThis dissertation identifies a strategy of artistic inquiry within contemporary media art practice. It applies the concept of material that acts in an agential capacity, generating performative acts. It argues that the emergent potentials of materials and their interconnectedness with the compositional layers of a work can facilitate modes of effecting change in the artistic system. Through the theoretical investigation of the production processes of physical structures and environments, the thesis focuses on the compositional dynamics within which materials actively perform. It examines how Lars Spuybroek’s architectural design method of Material Machines (2004), and both the tactile potential as well as tactical uses of materials as generators to the formtaking process, might describe an open and active artistic strategy for employing the experimental capacities of such materialization processes. Building on philosophical and conceptual arguments that trace concepts of agency (Bruno Latour’s Actant-Network theory) and enactment (Karen Barad’s concept of intra-acting), the thesis introduces the two installation works ANI_MATE (described as a performative pneumatic stage machine) and ON TRACK (described as a mechanic-robotic installation). These apply the introduced artistic strategies. The analyses of these two artworks traces the particular capacities of the materials involved (respectively, their elasticity or viscosity) to negotiate forces of physical movement, which effect the system to transiently or irreversibly transform. ANI_MATE is a machine that is artist-operated and that explores the relationship between liveanimation procedures and the transformability and flexibility of its material environment. In contrast, ON TRACK’s performative machine ecology removes human agency. The machines act autonomously, giving rise to chance in the artistic system and allowing agency to emerge from the dynamic interconnectivity between materials, parts, and processes, eventually producing an entropic scenario of spilling resources. The thesis concludes that, in the context of a post digital paradigm in-development, such artistic practice offers a new strategy for an emergent aesthetics within contemporary physical-digital performance

Adaptive and learning-based formation control of swarm robots

Autonomous aerial and wheeled mobile robots play a major role in tasks such as search and rescue, transportation, monitoring, and inspection. However, these operations are faced with a few open challenges including robust autonomy, and adaptive coordination based on the environment and operating conditions, particularly in swarm robots with limited communication and perception capabilities. Furthermore, the computational complexity increases exponentially with the number of robots in the swarm. This thesis examines two different aspects of the formation control problem. On the one hand, we investigate how formation could be performed by swarm robots with limited communication and perception (e.g., Crazyflie nano quadrotor). On the other hand, we explore human-swarm interaction (HSI) and different shared-control mechanisms between human and swarm robots (e.g., BristleBot) for artistic creation. In particular, we combine bio-inspired (i.e., flocking, foraging) techniques with learning-based control strategies (using artificial neural networks) for adaptive control of multi- robots. We first review how learning-based control and networked dynamical systems can be used to assign distributed and decentralized policies to individual robots such that the desired formation emerges from their collective behavior. We proceed by presenting a novel flocking control for UAV swarm using deep reinforcement learning. We formulate the flocking formation problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and consider a leader-follower configuration, where consensus among all UAVs is used to train a shared control policy, and each UAV performs actions based on the local information it collects. In addition, to avoid collision among UAVs and guarantee flocking and navigation, a reward function is added with the global flocking maintenance, mutual reward, and a collision penalty. We adapt deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) with centralized training and decentralized execution to obtain the flocking control policy using actor-critic networks and a global state space matrix. In the context of swarm robotics in arts, we investigate how the formation paradigm can serve as an interaction modality for artists to aesthetically utilize swarms. In particular, we explore particle swarm optimization (PSO) and random walk to control the communication between a team of robots with swarming behavior for musical creation

Vector synthesis: a media archaeological investigation into sound-modulated light

Vector Synthesis is a computational art project inspired by theories of media archaeology, by the history of computer and video art, and by the use of discarded and obsolete technologies such as the Cathode Ray Tube monitor. This text explores the military and techno-scientific legacies at the birth of modern computing, and charts attempts by artists of the subsequent two decades to decouple these tools from their destructive origins. Using this history as a basis, the author then describes a media archaeological, real time performance system using audio synthesis and vector graphics display techniques to investigate direct, synesthetic relationships between sound and image. Key to this system, realized in the Pure Data programming environment, is a didactic, open source approach which encourages reuse and modification by other artists within the experimental audiovisual arts community.Holzer, Dere

Electroacoustic concert and happening performances of the ‘60s and early ‘70s in Finland

Jufo: 73159 : lyhenne: EMS.In this paper, I explore different examples of how the new means of performing music in concert and happening settings manifested in the early years of electroacoustic music in Finland. No single point when electroacoustic music arrived in Finland can be pointed out. The development was slow and the central-European trends never landed in Finland in their pure form. Experimental concert performances of the radical young generation of musicians played a significant role in the emergence of the electronic medium in the Finnish music scene. The young composers and artists absorbed influences quite freely. Although their work can be seen even as a conscious protest against tradition, influences from the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, for example, were strong. This paper focuses on the works that expanded the traditional organization of a concert performance, introduced new means to perform electroacoustic music or applied electronic music technology beyond a music concert setting. These include, for example, film music, art exhibitions, happenings and even poem reading events. The examples are gathered from the works of composers Henrik Otto Donner (1939–2013) and Erkki Salmenhaara (1941–2002), avant-garde artist Mauri Antero Numminen (b. 1940), experimental film maker Eino Ruutsalo (1921–2001), as well as their close collaborator, electronic musical instrument designer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941).In this paper, I explore different examples of how the new means of performing music in concert and happening settings manifested in the early years of electroacoustic music in Finland. No single point when electroacoustic music arrived in Finland can be pointed out. The development was slow and the central-European trends never landed in Finland in their pure form. Experimental concert performances of the radical young generation of musicians played a significant role in the emergence of the electronic medium in the Finnish music scene. The young composers and artists absorbed influences quite freely. Although their work can be seen even as a conscious protest against tradition, influences from the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, for example, were strong. This paper focuses on the works that expanded the traditional organization of a concert performance, introduced new means to perform electroacoustic music or applied electronic music technology beyond a music concert setting. These include, for example, film music, art exhibitions, happenings and even poem reading events. The examples are gathered from the works of composers Henrik Otto Donner (1939–2013) and Erkki Salmenhaara (1941–2002), avant-garde artist Mauri Antero Numminen (b. 1940), experimental film maker Eino Ruutsalo (1921–2001), as well as their close collaborator, electronic musical instrument designer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941).Peer reviewe

A Grand Unification of the Sciences, Arts & Consciousness: Rediscovering the Pythagorean Plato’s Golden Mean Number System

In this condensed paper, by combining the insights from E-Infinity theory, along with Plato‘s initiatory insights into the golden section imbedded in his Principles of the One and Indefinite Dyad, David Bohm‘s ontological framework of the superimplicate, implicate and explicate orders, and the pervasive presence throughout physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology of the golden ratio (often veiled in Fibonacci and Lucas numbers), a profound golden mean number system emerges underlying the cosmos, nature and consciousness. This ubiquitous presence is evident in quantum mechanics, including quark masses, the chaos border, fine structure constant and entanglement, entropy and thermodynamic equilibrium, the periodic table of elements, nanotechnology, crystallography, computing, digital information, cryptography, genetics, nucleotide arrangement, Homo sapiens and Neanderthal genomes, DNA structure, cardiac anatomy and physiology, biometric measurements of the human and mammalian skulls, weather turbulence, plantphyllotaxis, planetary orbits and sizes, black holes, dark energy, dark matter, and even cosmogenesis – the very origin and structure of the universe. This has been pragmatically extended through the most ingenious biomimicry, from robotics, artificial intelligence, engineering and urban design, to extensions throughout history in architecture, music and the arts. We propose herein a grand unification of the sciences, arts and consciousness, rooted in an ontological superstructure known to the ancients as the One and IndefiniteDyad, that gives rise to a golden mean number system which is the substructure of all existence

Art and Technology: coherence, connectedness, and the integrative field

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/690 on 03.04.2017 by CS (TIS)This thesis is a theoretical and practical intervention in the field of art and technology. It proceeds from the re-examination of four specific domains that in the past 40 years have considerably informed the invention of new aesthetic forms. They are: art, science, nature and technology. We have identified that each one of these domains and the way they inform one another reflects the influence of a Western analytical tradition based on fragmentation, dichotomies and dualities. In consequence of this, art of the last decades has suffered from a sort of mechanistic thought which results from a predominantly weary aesthetic model, founded in dualities such as: object/process, form/behaviour, meaning/information. The main question that the present study addresses is how to overcome this predominantly reductionist inheritance and to develop an aesthetic model able to interconnect in an integrative fashion those disparate domains, respective discourses and practices? The answer to this question, developed throughout this thesis, is an aesthetic principle built upon the notions of resonance, coherence and field models, rooted in an integrative view of living organisms based on the theory of biophotons. This constitutes the main contribution of the thesis to new knowledge. The theoretical approach of this thesis is developed upon the revision of the concept of form, supported by a Gestalt analysis as provided by Rudolf Arnheim, and has involved the consideration of the ideas of Gilbert Simondon (the concept of "concretisation") and Vilem Flusser (the concept of "apparatus"), in order to gain a deeper insight into the nature of technology. In conclusion, the practice-based methodology of this thesis has been to develop artworks based on the confluence of living organisms (plants) and artificial systems in order to permit empirical observation and reflection on the proposed theory. The major outcome of the practice is the artwork "Breathing", a hybrid creature made of a living organism (a plant) and an artificial system. The creature responds to its environment through movement, light and the noise of its mechanical parts and interacts with the observer through his/her act of breathing. This work is the result of an investigation into plants as sensitive agents for the creation of art. The intention was to explore new forms of artistic experience through the dialogue of natural and artificial processes

Five object-based sound compositions

This text is a commentary on the nature of my principle artistic preoccupations over a period of research-creation spanning 2011 and 2013. The works discussed cover, each in their own way, various approaches to sound composition linked to physical objects. In effect, the object proves to be a fundamental element at the heart of discourse, which, though anchored in sound, is often multi-disciplinary. The object here is thus taken apart in its affective, conceptual, performative, visual, as well as sonic properties. The first part of this text illustrates the nature of the relationship between the physical object and the works submitted for this doctoral thesis. It focuses on the journey of the works: from their genesis in the artist’s collections of objects to their life on stage where the objects are used as visual elements in a performative context. The second part is dedicated to the conceptual and aesthetic content of the works, from which flow the principal elements of their discourse. Here, the relationships between the work, the concept and the sonic material are established, which together make up their aesthetic

What do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About Human-Robot Interaction?

This is a collection of papers presented at the workshop What Do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About HRI , held at the 2010 Human-Robot Interaction Conference, in Osaka, Japan