Alchimia: an inexplicable or mysterious transmutation, a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination

Alchimia V2 is an interactive installation that relies on a single spectator/interactor standing in front of a screen/webcam. It has been coded in Processing 3.0 and is calculation intensive, using the webcam to perform facial detection, while simultaneously processing pre-prepared images and sounds, thus creating a virtual space of constant audio-visual movement to deliberately interfere with real-time self-perception and self-recognition. Alchimia V2 questions and changes our relationship with our own representation through the (ever present) camera and screen by focusing on the spectator’s face, altering the expression, gender, assigning masks, making the facial traits diffuse, mixed, funny or scary, always mysterious, in a search for another "self", oblivious of the "selfie" pose and attitude, while allowing for self discovery and playfulness – or intimidation. Through the interaction the spectator/interactor is absorbed in the transmutation process, unaware of the fact that they also have become part of a performance: unique, unrepeatable, transformed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Post-fake artivism: how activism and art can break reflexivity

This text explores the historical evolution and intertwinement of propaganda, black-boxing, and attention control over the last century, and their combined roles in influencing the masses, more specifically through the spread of fake information in various media formats. In this scenario, artivism (art + activism), in its many forms, hacks the black boxes and exposes their inner workings, algorithms, and strategies. Thus, the author highlights key aspects of propaganda, as posited during the Second World War, and their subsequent spread into advertising, becoming an intrinsic part of global politics and businesses. The concept of black-boxing, as introduced by Latour to designate an opaque process that takes input A and transforms it into output B, while hiding its inner workings or hidden purposes, is then extended and applied to all modern content and media production – including propaganda and advertising – that occludes its sources and information transformation from the public. The reflexive use of these extended back-boxes, together with technological determinism, is fostering what is presented as a widespread phenomenon, turning fake into real, largely supported by a culture rooted in propaganda, thriving in attention-capturing mechanisms and in the conscious use of logical fallacies to maximize public impact, epitomized by the phrase “if faking it gets the job done, who cares?” Form has become more important than function, in the pursuit of goals. The appeal to emotion – overriding reason and fact – is privileged in public communication. Recent advances in generative AI black-boxed systems have densified the scenario, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between highly polished, often hyper-realistic, machine-generated deep-fakes and actual, human-generated media. In a post-fake reality punctuated by a barrage of cognitively overlaid buzzwords – from the simpler like, friend, or tag to the more complex Internet of behaviors, artificial intelligence, extended reality, or enhanced connectivity – created and controlled by dominant cultures to inculcate habits and norms, and to consolidate power, the dismantlement of this unprecedented curtain of clichés becomes urgent, and post-fake artivism (art+activism) may be a step in the right direction.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Light programming language

The increase of computing power in the last decades allowed for the creation and establishment of many high level programming languages such as Java and Python. In these languages, control over the hardware is often neglected in favor of more convenient abstractions for the programmer that offer some important guarantees (such as memory safety). At the same time, older lower level languages, such as C, are still considered one of the few viable options for systems programming. This work proposes a new low level programming language called Light that makes use of meta-programming ideas, commonly present in higher level, interpreted languages, in a compiled one. Light is a lower level, statically typed language that focuses on simplicity, consistent syntax and understandability. It has minimal runtime, no garbage collection and is composed of a simple core with a meta-programming layer built on top. We will present the complete language design and its compiler implementation. The objective of this work is to provide a general purpose system language that uses meta-programming to complement the base language as a tool to the programmer for building software.O aumento em poder computacional nas últimas decadas permitiram a criação e estabelecimento de diversas linguagens de programação de alto nível como Java e Python. Nessas linguagens, controle sobre o hardware é constantemente esquecido em favor de abstrações mais convenientes para o programador que oferencem algumas garantias importantes (como segurança de memória). Ao mesmo tempo, antigas linguagens de baixo nível como C, ainda são consideradas uma das poucas alternativas para linguagens de sistema. Esse trabalho propõe uma nova linguagem de programação de baixo nível chamada Light que faz uso de conceitos de meta-programação, comumente presentes em linguagens interpretadas de alto nível, em uma linguagem compilada. Light é uma linguagem de baixo nível, estaticamente tipada com foco em simplicidade, consistência de sintaxe e compreensibilidade. Possui ambiente de execução mínimo, não possui coletor de lixo e é composta de um núcleo simples com uma camada de meta-programação construída por cima. Nós apresentaremos o projeto completo da linguagem e a implementação de seu compilador. O objetivo deste trabalho é oferecer uma linguagem de sistema de uso geral que utiliza-se de meta-programação para complementar a linguagem base como uma ferramenta para o programador construir software

Generative video art

Generative art is historically and widely used for the production of abstract images and animations, each frame corresponding to a generation or iteration of the generative system, which runs within the aesthetic boundaries defined by its author. But rather than being limited to image or sound synthesis, generative systems can also manipulate video samples and still images from external sources, and include vectors that can be mapped to the concepts of shot, sequence, rhythm and montage. Furthermore, generative systems need not be limited to the visual plane and can also render audio, either through sound synthesis or by manipulating sound samples. And in this case, since the output is a constant and uninterrupted audio-visual stream, is it not possible to speak of generative video art, as it becomes indistinguishable from its modern-day video art digital counterparts? Within this perspective, this article traces back the historical roots of generative video art, and proposes a theoretical model for generative video art systems, as a creative intersection of two artistic genres, often seen as disjoint.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Generative ominous dataset: testing the current public perception of generative art

The advent of generative AI artworks has paved the way for groundbreaking explorations in the realm of digital creativity. This article delves into the multifaceted dimensions of G.O.D., an abbreviation for the art project Generative Ominous Dataset. G.O.D. aims at critically engaging with contemporary AI generative image systems and their intricate interplay with copyright issues, artistic autonomy, and the ethical implications of data collection, unravelling its conceptual underpinnings and its implications for the broader discourse on artificial intelligence, artistic agency, and the evolving contours of digital art. G.O.D. is a generative artwork, entirely coded in Processing, and developed within a/r/cography, a creative research methodology. G.O.D. scrutinizes and questions the ethics of contemporary text-to-image AI-based systems, such as Midjourney, DALL-E, or Firefly. These systems have been at the centre of controversies concerning the datasets used for their training, which encompass online sourced copyrighted materials, without authorization or attribution, masking questionable approaches with technological dazzlement. Many artists and authors find their works repurposed by these systems for the mass production of digital derivatives. G.O.D. aims at critically exposing art audiences to these concerns.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Consumer Behavior: A Literature Review of the Early Research on the COVID-19 Outbreak

The outbreak of COVID-19 has substantially altered trends and the research agenda in Consumer Behavior (CB). The main objectives of this article is analyze and classify the main contributions published the early research on CB on the COVID -19 pandemic , seeking to discover the perspective and the gaps and outline future avenues of research . With this article, we performed a systematic literature review based on articles published in Web of Science (WoS). We used a bibliometric approach based on Bibliographic Coupling of Documents complemented by a thematic analysis which allows us to provide a more holistic overview of the domain under study. Based on literature review six key thematic areas were identified in CB research of early stage of the pandemic: Environmental Factors, Social Media CB and Business Strategies, Personal and Psychological Characteristics , Purchase Process , and Panic buying . The conclusions present limitations inherent to systematic literature review articles, in particular the filters used to limit the search.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The cinematic selfie: questioning the self through generative art

This article addresses and questions the magic-mirror phenomenon, popularised by current smartphone selfie and video capture apps. This phenomenon stimulates the illusion of control over the appearance of the face, either through applying semi-automatic soft filters to highlight the face area, to smooth the skin or correct the posture; or through the use of humorous add-ons or distortions, such as bunny ears or anime features, among others. However these results are short-lived, as their publication in social networks is either ephemeral – as a story – or timed to become invisible or irrelevant – in the timeline stream. Cumulatively they leave little margin (if at all) to stimulate a deeper reflection on the subject of (self) identity, and could thus be reduced to an expression of narcissism and consumption rather than a shared, transformative, meaningful practice. The two generative artworks described in this article, on the other hand, seek to guide the visitor beyond the visual magic-mirror through thought-provoking and reflective processes, where face-based audio-visual trance inducing cycles are used to hint at new identities and possibilities, challenging species, race, gender and age. These artworks seek to immerse the visitor, with narrowed awareness of external surroundings and stimuli, with a deepened focus in a synesthetic experience of flow, aiming at an altered perception of the self. If appearance can act as a tool to communicate one’s identity to others, this article ponders the possibility that such a synesthetic environment can be artivistically used to influence the perception of the self.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A governação da Internet

A GOVERNAÇÃO DA INTERNET pode ser defi - nida como o desenvolvimento e aplicação pelos governos, o sector privado e a sociedade civil, no âmbito das respectivas competências e atribuições, de princípios, normas, regras, processos decisionais e programas comuns, que regulam a evolução e utilização da Internet. Quando se fala da governação da Internet não se pode fi car alheio ao papel fundamental de um conjunto de organizações que, à escala nacional, europeia e mundial, têm trabalhado no sentido de lidar com as matérias e problemas que daí advém. Merecem-nos aqui especial destaque o ICANN, o IGF, o ITU, o ISOC, a Comissão Europeia e, a nível nacional, as entidades responsáveis pela gestão dos ccTLD

A novel causally consistent replication protocol with partial geo-replication

Distributed storage systems are a fundamental component of large-scale Internet services. To keep up with the increasing expectations of users regarding availability and latency, the design of data storage systems has evolved to achieve these properties, by exploiting techniques such as partial replication, geo-replication and weaker consistency models. While systems with these characteristics exist, they usually do not provide all these properties or do so in an inefficient manner, not taking full advantage of them. Additionally, weak consistency models, such as eventual consistency, put an excessively high burden on application programmers for writing correct applications, and hence, multiple systems have moved towards providing additional consistency guarantees such as implementing the causal (and causal+) consistency models. In this thesis we approach the existing challenges in designing a causally consistent replication protocol, with a focus on the use of geo and partial data replication. To this end, we present a novel replication protocol, capable of enriching an existing geo and partially replicated datastore with the causal+ consistency model. In addition, this thesis also presents a concrete implementation of the proposed protocol over the popular Cassandra datastore system. This implementation is complemented with experimental results obtained in a realistic scenario, in which we compare our proposal withmultiple configurations of the Cassandra datastore (without causal consistency guarantees) and with other existing alternatives. The results show that our proposed solution is able to achieve a balanced performance, with low data visibility delays and without significant performance penalties

Speciesism | Ageism | Racism

Speciesism | Ageism | Racism (SAR) is a generative cinematic artwork stemming from the millennia-old practice of mask making and laying claim to the fundamental richness of diversity. SAR generates sequences of masks from photos of people and animals without bias, imbued meaning or particular intent, leaving all interpretations and assumptions to the audience. SAR is aesthetically rooted in traditional folklore and the worldwide popular art of mask-making, in the concepts of “loop” and metric montage. Conceptually, SAR thrives in the intersectionality of postcolonial theory, feminist and anti-discrimination studies, as well as animal rights movements, policies and practices. By stripping away the ability to consistently identify species, age, race, gender or sexual orientation, the artwork allows for a disruptive aesthetic appreciation, which confronts the ideology and politics of group superiority. SAR delivers a participatory, hypnotic, rhythmic and generative audio-visual experience, charged with an anti-discriminatory message countering speciesism, ageism and racism. Speciesism | Ageism | Racism can be enjoyed in its on-line pre-calculated version at https://pedroveiga.com/sar-speciesism-ageism-racism/info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio