Dance performance in cyberspace - transfer and transformation

The aim of this research undertaking is to understand the potential development of dance performance in the context of cyberculture, by examining the way practitioners use new media to create artworks that include audience participation, and by endeavouring in their theorization. With specific reference to cyberspace as a concept of electronic, networked and navigable space, the enquiry traces the connections such practices have with conventions of the medium of dance, which operate in its widely known condition as a live performing art. But acknowledgement that new media and new contexts of production and reception inform the characteristics of these artworks and their discursive articulation, in terms of the way people and digital technologies interact in contemporary culture, is a major principle to their analysis and evaluation. This qualitative research is based on case-study design as a means of finding pragmatic evidence in particulars, to illustrate abstract concepts, technological processes and aesthetic values that are underway in a new area of knowledge. The field where this research operates within is located by a mapping of published literature that informs a theoretical interdisciplinary framework, which contextualizes the interpretation of artworks. The selected case studies have been subject to a process of systematic and detailed analysis, entailed with a model devised for the purpose of this enquiry. From this undertaking it can be claimed that while an extensive array of technologies, media and interactive models is available in this field, the artists pursue a commitment to demonstrate their worth for specifically developing (new media) dance performance, and for dance performance to articulate technological and critical issues for cyberculture studies. The results of this enquiry also contribute to conceptual understanding of what dance can be, today, in the light of technological changes

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture

The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to severely conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the various ways actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture – although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity, addressing these issues will inevitably clamor for the reconfiguration of the human as well

Listening back

Listening Back is a practice-based research project that develops a critical mode of sonic inquiry into a technique of contemporary Web surveillance – the cookie. Following creative sonification practices, cookie data is sonified as a strategy for interrupting the visual surface of the browser interface to sonically draw attention to backend data capture. Theoretical scholarship from surveillance studies proposes that visual panopticism has been largely superseded by automated technologies of humanly incomprehensible data collection. Scholars such as Mark Andrejevic have observed how the operations of algorithmic surveillance have become post-representational. Listening Back aims to address the post-representational character of Web surveillance by asking: how can artists critically render an online experience of continuous and ubiquitous surveillance? During this PhD research, I have created the Listening Back browser add-on that sonifies Internet cookies in real-time. The add-on has been enacted across both live performance, installation, and personal computer usage. As a sounding Web-based arts practice, it deploys artistic approaches to browser add-ons and creative data sonification that I and others have developed within networked and sounding art fields during the last two decades. Artists such as Adriana Knouf, Allison Burtch and Michael Mandiberg have addressed the opacity and normalisation of the Web browser by creating artistic browser add-ons. These ethico-aesthetic strategies of awareness adopt Web protocols and data mining techniques to re-navigate and expose ordinarily obscured data logics and repurpose the browser as a site for artistic practice. In addition to repurposing and exposing hidden cookie data, sonification aims to situate an embodied listening within the real-time dynamics of Web surveillance and facilitate an engagement across critical analysis and sensing modes of online surveillance. By providing the opportunity to listen back, a human-level connection to real-time data capture is facilitated as an aesthetic sounding strategy for making the capture of surveillant data online tangible. Listening Back, as practice-based research, contributes a new artistic strategy to creative browser add-on practices by engaging an embodied listening experience that deploys time-based and experiential aspects of sound. Listening Back also uses creative sonification to situate online listening as an activity that occurs at the intersection of the network infrastructure, the Web browser, and personal computing

Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices is a volume of essays that provides a detailed account of born-digital literature by artists and scholars who have contributed to its birth and evolution. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this book takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration, treating electronic literature from the perspective of the digital humanities (DH)––that is, as an area of scholarship and practice that exists at the juncture between the literary and the algorithmic. The domain of DH is typically segmented into the two seemingly disparate strands of criticism and building, with scholars either studying the synthesis between cultural expression and screens or the use of technology to make artifacts in themselves. This book regards electronic literature as fundamentally DH in that it synthesizes these two constituents. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities provides a context for the development of the field, informed by the forms and practices that have emerged throughout the DH moment, and finally, offers resources for others interested in learning more about electronic literature