Art in the Age of Networks - Networks as a Way of Thinking

The theme-based and material-based units (with lessons and lesson sequences) propose a curriculum for one academic semester in an undergraduate visual arts school (for sophomore, 2nd year, or junior, 3rd year students). However the lessons could be modified and tailored to any age group developmentally. This curricular framework aims to foster collaboration (within individuals, materials and disciplines), explore networked pedagogy and networks in pedagogy as a collaborating force through and with the visual arts and explore the materiality of the code and the digital media. The course also engages with new media theory and literature, investigates the materiality of the digital media as collaborators, mediators and metaphors and reflects on how technology affects pedagogy and allows students to tailor projects according to their own interests. The course content is flexible in its approach with plenty of elbowroom. The 3rd Unit of the suggested curriculum also seeks to advocate for social justice; students cultivate perspectives about the power of digital media to address social issues, they probe into matters of social justice or injustice with the featured artists and make connections with the artistic processes and goals of the artists (listed in the lessons) to reflect on the sociopolitical context of their own art making. The students also think about networks as an abstract or tangible concept (digital, social, physical, and biological networks) and create works in an open-ended, student-centric environment that encourages critical thinking, independent decision-making and enables them to chose their own nature/ track of projects.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cstae_resource_higher_education/1002/thumbnail.jp

Between Sense and Sensibility: Declarative narrativisation of mental models as a basis and benchmark for visuo-spatial cognition and computation focussed collaborative cognitive systems

What lies between `\emph{sensing}' and `\emph{sensibility}'? In other words, what kind of cognitive processes mediate sensing capability, and the formation of sensible impressions ---e.g., abstractions, analogies, hypotheses and theory formation, beliefs and their revision, argument formation--- in domain-specific problem solving, or in regular activities of everyday living, working and simply going around in the environment? How can knowledge and reasoning about such capabilities, as exhibited by humans in particular problem contexts, be used as a model and benchmark for the development of collaborative cognitive (interaction) systems concerned with human assistance, assurance, and empowerment? We pose these questions in the context of a range of assistive technologies concerned with \emph{visuo-spatial perception and cognition} tasks encompassing aspects such as commonsense, creativity, and the application of specialist domain knowledge and problem-solving thought processes. Assistive technologies being considered include: (a) human activity interpretation; (b) high-level cognitive rovotics; (c) people-centred creative design in domains such as architecture & digital media creation, and (d) qualitative analyses geographic information systems. Computational narratives not only provide a rich cognitive basis, but they also serve as a benchmark of functional performance in our development of computational cognitive assistance systems. We posit that computational narrativisation pertaining to space, actions, and change provides a useful model of \emph{visual} and \emph{spatio-temporal thinking} within a wide-range of problem-solving tasks and application areas where collaborative cognitive systems could serve an assistive and empowering function.Comment: 5 pages, research statement summarising recent publication

E-topia: Utopia after the Mediated Body

open access journalA custom-made media installation, diplorasis, will be used to explore the body in digital media. This mediated body attempts to re-think how the Deleuzian time-image is translated from its cinematic confinement to the space of new media. In diplorasis the digitized time-image becomes more directly incorporated with-in the bodily schema. Consequently, the thinking of the virtual and actual space of the body in diplorasis enables a questioning of bodily space-time, and particularly the relation between self and digitized self-image. It is thus crucial to re-frame how this digitized mediated body is distinct from a conventional notion of a metric and habitual space—one that is reinforced by, for example, the medium of linear perspective. The articulation of the mediated body will be used to in-form and extend Elizabeth Grosz’s paradoxical reading of embodiment and utopia, by revisiting the notions of utopia as eu-topic/ou-topic. The spatio-temporality of the topos must be re-considered before utopia. Foucault’s analogy of the mirror will then serve to superimpose the dual and slippery relations between utopia and the heterotopic. The digitized mediated body will thus seek to explore emerging ways by which to consider the utopic by conflating embodiment, time and space within an electronic topos. It is argued that as the sensing and cognitive body becomes increasingly pliable in relation to technological mediations, our very understanding of space-time is changing

Wearable performance

This is the post-print version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Taylor & FrancisWearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. 'Wearable performance' briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with 'design in motion' and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab which involves transdisciplinary convergences between fashion and dance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies and digital animation. The concept of an 'evolving' garment design that is materialised (mobilised) in live performance between partners originates from DAP Lab's work with telepresence and distributed media addressing the 'connective tissues' and 'wearabilities' of projected bodies through a study of shared embodiment and perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing). Such notions of wearability are applied both to the immediate sensory processing on the performer's body and to the processing of the responsive, animate environment. Wearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. 'Wearable performance' briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with 'design in motion' and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab which involves transdisciplinary convergences between fashion and dance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies and digital animation. The concept of an 'evolving' garment design that is materialised (mobilised) in live performance between partners originates from DAP Lab's work with telepresence and distributed media addressing the 'connective tissues' and 'wearabilities' of projected bodies through a study of shared embodiment and perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing). Such notions of wearability are applied both to the immediate sensory processing on the performer's body and to the processing of the responsive, animate environment

Irony's architecture: Reflections on a photographic research project

This paper presents a research approach based on irony, rather than certainty. Using Richard Rorty's conception of irony, we contend that much traditional research in management presents a final language which is implicit in both the construction of a research method and its final presentation as findings. This paper suggests we should take irony more seriously, and deliberately construct research to allow and encourage re-description by our research's final arbiters - its readers, and even its subjects. Further, we advocate that by inviting irony into our work, we encourage greater identification between ourselves, our audience of readers, and the subjects of our work. We illustrate our argument by reflecting on a recent photographic research project which was a collaborative effort between management researchers and an artist. We show how the simple architecture of this project was built from doubt and how irony is communicated through the pictures. We then show how photography can be a useful technique that encourages readers to engage in re-description of petit récits (small stories), told through images. We discuss our reflections by focusing on the implications of our research for management education

Architecture and Visual Narrative

Architecture communication tools have been implemented in recent history by strategies and narrative artifices imported from cinema, comic, photo-journalism and infographic. The architect has integrated the traditional encoded drawing with more extensive narrative artifacts to expand the basin of its interlocutors and to describe underestimated aspects of architecture and design process. Through the illustration of recent significant experiences, this paper intends to highlight the great variety of images that can be attributed today to architecture and the lack of proper attention on this production by Visual Studies

Image annotation with Photocopain

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to organise their collections so that they can make best use of them. This paper describes the Photocopain system, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information from other readily available sources in order to generate outline annotations for that photograph that the user may further extend or amend

Redesigning architecture through photography

Abstract – This paper focuses on the possibility of (re)designing architecture virtually with the help of one of the most important representation tools: Photography. Various digital processes like stitching multiple photos together and mirroring images in image editing software like Photoshop, allow this virtual architecture to take place in virtual environments. Photography can be utilized in the process of ‘constructing’ a new space --that we can call ‘narrative space’-- from an existing spatial body. This narrative space can also be defined as a ‘manufactured metaspace’ which is a space beyond reality and representation: A constructed reality that exists solely in digital realms like Second Life

Virtual architecture: reconstructing architecture through photography

The concept of construction in architectural design process is a temporary action that exists for a while and transforms itself into another product; i.e. the final building to be inhabited. Construction site can be taken as a podium where a play-to-remain-incomplete is being staged. The incompleteness causes us to dream, due to the fact that a complete building loses its narrative potential as it informs us about all the necessary pieces that constitute the whole: There is no puzzle to solve... Construction in this sense is like a historical ruin; Paul Zucker asserts that "ruins have held for a long time a unique position in the visual, emotional, and literary imagery of man. They have fascinated artists, poets, scholars, and sightseers alike. Devastated by time or willful destruction, incomplete as they are, they represent a combination of man-made forms and of organic nature." Architectural photography has the potential of re-creating this puzzle back again in order to bring an alternative representation to architecture. The architectural photographer is sometimes offered the freedom of reinterpreting, reconstructing architecture in order to be able to present a novel virtual perception to the audience. The idea here is to get some spatial clues that can later be used in other architectural projects. I was personally invited to two different concept exhibits in which I was given the freedom of inventing a virtual architecture through photography. The concept text written for one of these exhibits goes as follows: “I went, saw, stopped, attempted to grasp and enter it, looked at construction process and workers with respect, tried to internalize, wanted to claim it for a while, dreamed of creating a microcosm out of the macrocosm I was in, shot and shot and shot and finally selected: The created world, though intended for all, was probably quite a personal illusion...” Virtual architecture is a term used for architecture specifically created in the computer environment and never used in the realm of architectural photography. People like Piranesi, Lebbeus Woods, M.C. Escher, Marcos Novak, etc. previously dreamed about architectures that could exist virtually on paper, screen, digital environments. This paper will try to prove that this practice of (re)designing architecture virtually can be transferred to one of the most important realms of visuality: Photography. Various digital processes like stitching multiple photos together and mirroring images in image editing software like Photoshop, allow this virtual architecture to take place in the computer environment. Following this, I propose to raise the term “snap architecture” to connect it to the frequently referred concept of “paper architecture.” Keywords: virtual, (re)construction, snap architecture, paper architecture, illusion, puzzle, incompleteness, representation, perception, reinterpretation, microcosm vs. macrocosm, fictional architecture, metaspace, narrative space, generative architecture