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

Maths, Logic and Language

A work on the philosophy of mathematics (2017) ‘Number’, such a simple idea, and yet it fascinated and absorbed the greatest proportion of human geniuses over centuries, not to mention the likes of Pythagoras, Euclid, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes and countless maths giants like Euler, Gauss and Hilbert, etc.. Einstein thought of pure maths as the poetry of logical ideas, the exactitude of which, although independent of experience, strangely seems to benefit the study of the objects of reality. And, interestingly as well as surprisingly we are nowhere near any clear understandings of numbers despite discoveries of many productive usages of numbers. This is - rightly or wrongly - a humble attempt to approach the subject from an angle hitherto unthought-of

Understanding Visualization: A formal approach using category theory and semiotics

This article combines the vocabulary of semiotics and category theory to provide a formal analysis of visualization. It shows how familiar processes of visualization fit the semiotic frameworks of both Saussure and Peirce, and extends these structures using the tools of category theory to provide a general framework for understanding visualization in practice, including: relationships between systems, data collected from those systems, renderings of those data in the form of representations, the reading of those representations to create visualizations, and the use of those visualizations to create knowledge and understanding of the system under inspection. The resulting framework is validated by demonstrating how familiar information visualization concepts (such as literalness, sensitivity, redundancy, ambiguity, generalizability, and chart junk) arise naturally from it and can be defined formally and precisely. This article generalizes previous work on the formal characterization of visualization by, inter alia, Ziemkiewicz and Kosara and allows us to formally distinguish properties of the visualization process that previous work does not

Identity in Flux: A Theoretical and Choreographic Enquiry into the Identity of The Open Dance Work

This thesis presents a work of practical scholarship which re-examines issues of identity in the context of the open dance work. The debate takes the form of a symbiotic philosophical and choreographic enquiry into the identity of the open dance work. The philosophical enquiry examines the adequacy to the open work of theories of identity derived from two distinctive strands of philosophical theory, the first from the analytic tradition, the second from contemporary French philosophy. The choreographic processes which led to the creation of two open dance works constituted a central strand of the debate. Each work interrogates the adequacy of these theories of identity to the artistic theories which underpin open dance works. The first work, Intimate Memories, problematised theories of identity which were developed by analytic philosophers in the 1970s and 80s, and subsequently adopted by dance theorists, through an examination of their applicability to the open dance work. This strand of choreographic research revealed that, although these theories allowed open dance works to be individuated, they did not fully account for the particularities of the processual character of the open dance work. This interim conclusion led to an examination of the pertinence of Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of the event to questions concerning identity raised by the open dance work. The second dance work, Halo in Performance, which was developed in the context of a collaborative engagement between choreographic and interactive digital arts practices, is an embodiment of Deleuze and Guattari’s process-oriented ontology of the event. This work indicates that theories of identity and/or individuation which are grounded in an ontology of flux are a more appropriate model to apply to the open dance work than those grounded in an ontology of substance

On the critical editing of Electronic and Mixed Music. Historical matters and new perspectives

Today, the sources of electronic and mixed music produced in the XXth century by analog means have entered the digital documentary domain. Therefore, the theoretical reflection on the ethics of preservation, restoration and re-issue of audiovisual documents cannot ignore the models of communication engineering: encodeing and decoding, audio signal processing \u2013 also implemented in the World Wide Web today \u2013 are of paramount importance. After World War II, a new musical research was born within the context of acoustical and electro-acoustical communication systems and it found a privileged thread in the Theory of Information. In the world of electronic and mixed music the technological system is an integral part of the compositional project, and the audio tracks represent a \u2018projection\u2019 of the production project. Audio recordings deliver to the editor an essential evidence for reconstructing the technical and theoretical world of the composers, which is to say their pre-post-history. In this paper, the meta-conceptual role of Information and Communication Theory is historized and it becomes an integral part of a systemic method for the restitution of the electronic musical work. With a wide range of examples (including works by Edgard Vare\u300se, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Ge\u301rard Grisey) we show peculiarities and issues of the critical editing of this repertoire

Linking visual and linguistic composition : a study of cognition using computer microworlds.

This study is devoted to investigating links between the mental processes of visual composition and those of linguistic composition. The study has two components, each of which compares visual/verbal pairs. First is a comparison of visual and verbal features in picture books created by students. These books are alphabet books created in the tradition of ABC books for children. They were produced using standard desk-top publishing techniques. Because desk-top publishing involves text and graphics, it is an environment in which an individual\u27s skill with both sentences and pictures may be studied. Second is a set of case studies of students\u27 visual and linguistic compositions. These compositions have been constructed within the constraints of computer based microworlds designed by the researcher. (Computers are compositional tools with a new generality. They let the two media meet on common ground.) This study accentuates the importance of the computer as a tool for generalized composition, perhaps the most important role of computers in education

Press Play: Video Games and the Ludic Quality of Aesthetic Experiences across Media

This dissertation examines and disrupts the way key scholarly, technical, and cultural discourses distinguish video games as a medium from film by shifting critical attention to how these media are experienced during reception. This premise of this intervention is that a medium-specific outlook of video games suppresses significant dissimilarities among video games, and also overlooks video games’ lineage in relation to how other media are experienced as aesthetic expressions. This has also meant that the vast critical resources within film and media studies remains extensively underutilized within video game scholarship. Beyond noting crucial formal resonances between certain video games and films, this project enhances our understanding of both forms by critiquing the specific presumptions used to define video games in significant by powerful cultural gatekeepers including the United States Supreme Court and the Museum of Modern Art. The premises challenged include the notion that video games are all principally games, that video games have a computational materiality that warrants a distinct critical approach compared to film, that video games are designed to be interactive in way that other aesthetic forms are not, that video games provide a way of inhabiting fictional worlds that films cannot, and that video games lack a capacity to reflect our historical world back to us in manner comparable to film’s documentary capacity. The point is not to suppress distinctions between film and video games, but to understand overlooked facets common to the forms as experienced, thus better situating video games in relation to film studies