Fine Art Pattern Extraction and Recognition

This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Journal of Imaging (ISSN 2313-433X) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jimaging/special issues/faper2020)

Intuitive interaction: Steps towards an integral understanding of the user experience in interaction design

A critical review of traditional practices and methodologies demonstrates an underplaying of firstly the role of emotions and secondly aspects of exploration in interaction behaviour in favour of a goal orientated focus in the user experience (UX). Consequently, the UX is a commodity that can be designed, measured, and predicted. An integral understanding of the UX attempts to overcome the rationalistic and instrumental mindset of traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) on several levels. Firstly, the thesis seeks to complement a functional view of interaction with a qualitative one that considers the complexity of emotions. Emotions are at the heart of engagement and connect action irreversibly to the moment it occurs; they are intettwined with cognition, and decision making. Furthermore, they introduce the vague and ambiguous aspects of experience and open it up to potentiality of creation. Secondly, the thesis examines the relationship between purposive and non-purposive user behaviour such as exploration, play and discovery. The integral position proposed here stresses the procedurally relational nature and complexity of interaction experience. This requires revisiting and augmenting key themes of HCI practice such as interactivity and intuitive design. Intuition is investigated as an early and unconscious form of learning, and unstructured browsing discussed as random interaction mechanisms as forms of implicit learning. Interactivity here is the space for user's actions, contributions and creativity, not only in the design process but also during interaction as co-authors of their experiences. Finally, I envisage integral forms of usability methods to embrace the vague and the ambiguous, in order to enrich HCI's vocabulary and design potential. Key readings that inform this position cut across contemporary philosophy, media and interaction studies and professional HCI literature. On a practical level, a series of experimental interaction designs for web-browsing aim to augment the user's experience, and create space for user's intuition

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

Procedural Aesthetics and the Emergence of NeuroArt

Although Neuroart is related to the concept of Neuroaesthetics (S. Zeki), which is based on a scientific approach to aesthetic perception of art, and to the concepts of Neuroplastic arts (G. Novakovic) and Neuromedia (J. Scott) endorsing collaboration between artists and neuroscientists, it is at the same time distinct from them. We are using the term literally to refer to those artworks that are based on neural / brain waves signals and the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) or more specifically, EEG headsets in the production and display of artworks. We focus on EEG-based sound art, visual arts, interactive installations, and performance arts, and we identify Neuroart as a novel, emerging form or sub-genre of new media art. However, we do not limit Neuroart to human-generated artworks only. Given that Neuroart applies to detection or inspection of neural electric signals, we claim that the electric nature of those signals also applies to processes inherent in machine processing or neural computing such as Google Deep Dream and other generic platforms that lay the foundations for computer and/or AI generated art forms including database art, software art, visualization art, sonification art as well as those artworks that result in material artifacts presented in traditional exhibition format. We additionally claim that regardless whether the artworks of Neuroart are driven by a human or machine, they can have the same aesthetic discursive value, but within a context of a newly defined discipline of aesthetics that is Procedural Aesthetics. The Procedural Aesthetics (or the aesthetics of signal), can be understood as the discursiveness of the very process of signals (intensities) emission before they enter the sphere of conscious cognition. It is a pre-receptive and pre-semantics phenomenon. It deals with the processes otherwise not available to human perceptive apparatus, trying to reveal them, unmask them, by offering them to interpretation as cultural artifacts. And in order to do this, it relies heavily on technology and technical equipment allowing us the access to these ‘invisible’ processes through visualization, sonification, textualization, mapping and other forms of interpretable representations displayed as artworks

Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Live Coding

Open Access peer reviewed papers on live coding published at the 1st International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) in Leeds

Vox ex machina : towards a digital poetics of the disembodied voice

This thesis explores the notion of ‘voice’ in relation to contemporary poetics and the digital arts. It is a practice-based project that produces a theoretical and creative space in which a theory of the ‘voice of the machine’ is discovered and tested. Through a series of research chapters and critical reflections this thesis tests ideas of dictation, translation, inscription and embodiment using the poetic device of the disembodied — or acousmatic — voice as a fundamental theoretical framework, which in turn informs my practice. I begin with a study of Jack Spicer’s book After Lorca, a collection of translated poems that are dictated to Spicer by the ghost of Federico García Lorca. Using the work of Mladen Dolar, I explore the idea of the acousmatic voice and the processes of translation that emerge from this when one is in communion with the dead. From this I identify a ‘network of tradition’: Spicer’s matrix of historical, poetic associations to which belongs W.B. Yeats, another poet who used spirit dictation in composition. I focus on the practice of Yeats’s wife, George, who, acting as a medium, produced hundreds of manuscripts of automatic writing and drawing. Through a study of Johanna Drucker’s notion of graphesis, via discussions on choreography, I establish George Yeats as a spiritual writing machine whose practice works as an acoustic register of ghostly dictation and audition. I consider the idea of katabasis — an Orphic descent to retrieve a voice — that underpins Spicer’s poetics in After Lorca and I use this as a catalyst to enact gestures of archival katabasis — in pursuit of George Yeats — and what I term as the kata_BASIC, which is a descent into the machine to retrieve its voice. Using the random-chance poetics of Jackson Mac Low as a practice methodology I understand the voice of the machine to be an expression of its agency and computational processes, which are materialised in machine-mediated interventions such as the glitch. The practice I produce in this project — poetry, objects, video and sound — tests ideas of translation, acoustic imagery, hybridity and transcreation in light of the idea of a shared voice of collaboration that exists between the machine and the archived or disembodied voices that it (re)mediates