Collaborative registers of interactive art.

The ubiquity of interactive technologies has given rise to new forms and opportunities for interactive digital art. Collaboration has been identified as a way for artists to engage in complex technologically based projects. This paper considers different forms of collaboration in relation to two interactive art projects. Collaborative and participatory art practices operate on multiple registers. The findings of the research discussed in this paper corroborate previous work on co-creativity and interactive art and extend to considerations of institutional collaboration, materiality, prototyping and the advantages of creative collectives

Resonances: The sound of performance

It is a hot summer night in August 2013, as the audience gathers near the entrance of the large Gray Hall at the south side of the former coal mine Göttelborn (Germany). The sun has set, and there is only the gray light of dusk in the performance space inside, streaming through the large glass façade, falling onto a small array of stones laid out on the floor. Additional light from a video projector streams over the stones, and a tiny figure of a dancer is seen crawling over rocks, moving in the strange, a-syncopated rhythm of jump cuts. Slowly the sound of rocks scratching against a stone surface begins to be heard, it will remain the only sound for a while, then Japanese instrumentalist Emi Watanabe steps into the empty space with her flute

Immaterial Attachments: Performing iPhone and the Rhetorics of Dematerialization

Engaging with rhetorical studies, performance studies, and surveillance studies, this thesis attempts to outline the ideological construction of the experience of iPhone, underlining how this experience—and its performance—is imbricated with conceptions of social control. To do this, I begin with the cultural oscillation between extreme psychological attachment to Apple’s iPhone and its complementary disposability. How can an object generate such attachment, yet remain disposable? To get at this question, I examine how attachment and disposability are layered together in an experience of iPhone structured by rhetorics of dematerialization. These are visual and discursive fragments that, together, construct an ideological impulse that tends toward the disappearance of the objects to which they refer, overall, working to supplement and promote iPhone’s culture of disposability. In relation to iPhone, this thesis examines rhetorics of dematerialization through three intersecting vectors: the device, the human user, and the proximal space that stages their interaction. With rhetorics of dematerialization as the larger frame, my main analyses focus on specific instances of the tension between attachment and disposability, considered as performances of attachment. Generally, these are everyday performances on and with iPhone—gestural interface, picking it up, throwing it out—that 1) collapse attachment and disposability into each other under the rhetorical rubric of a phenomenal dematerialization, 2) require users to enact, embody, and assume the rhetorics of dematerialization, and 3) have both cultural and individual effects. iPhone’s culture of disposability relies on the dematerialization of waste and wasteful consumer practices. Individually, performances of attachment with iPhone allow new models of surveillance (through data-gathering and self-tracking practices) to permeate users’ everyday experience

FeelOpo: feel(ing) the beat of Oporto

Instalação de arte digital publicada nas atas da 8th International Conference on Digital Arts – ARTECH 2017, realizada em Macau de 6-8 de setembro de 2017This digital art installation has as main goal to introduce an interface through which the image of the city of Oporto (in Northern Portugal) is designed and activated by the presence of one or more people standing in the exhibition space. It brings up the metaphor of the city as a living organism allowing visitors to explore, at different levels, several features very typical of this city. A diversity of possible routes is embedded in the outfit and activated as visitors move across the exhibition space, revealing experiences by means of projected videos related to the cultural specificity of the city. In this way, as the human body interacts with the space and the screen, uncovering stories, memories, expressions, sounds, colours, textures, new designs and emotions are presented in the form of videos that narrate life fragments of Oporto and its people. Being supported by a mix of audio-visual records, FeelOpo intends to build "the beat of Oporto" through striking visual narratives.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Museums and New Media Art

Investigates the relationship between new media art and museums

Worlds at our fingertips:reading (in) <i>What Remains of Edith Finch</i>

Video games are works of written code which portray worlds and characters in action and facilitate an aesthetic and interpretive experience. Beyond this similarity to literary works, some video games deploy various design strategies which blend gameplay and literary elements to explicitly foreground a hybrid literary/ludic experience. We identify three such strategies: engaging with literary structures, forms and techniques; deploying text in an aesthetic rather than a functional way; and intertextuality. This paper aims to analyse how these design strategies are deployed in What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017) to support a hybrid readerly/playerly experience. We argue that this type of design is particularly suited for walking simulators because they support interpretive play (Upton, 2015) through slowness, ambiguity (Muscat et al., 2016; Pinchbeck 2012), narrative and aesthetic aspirations (Carbo-Mascarell, 2016). Understanding walking sims as literary games (Ensslin, 2014) can shift the emphasis from their lack of ‘traditional’ gameplay complexity and focus instead on the opportunities that they afford for hybrid storytelling and for weaving literature and gameplay in innovative and playful ways